3 Epiphany B
Transcribed from a
sermon given on
January 22, 2012
By Rev. Valerie Ann
Hart
St. Barnabas
Episcopal Church
Mark 1:14-20
Jonah
Psalm 62
I’d like you to imagine that you
have gone to Yosemite and you decide that one day you are going to take a day hike
into the backcountry. You are hiking and having a great time. It is after lunch
and getting into the afternoon so you start to head back, but nothing looks
quite right. You begin to suspect, “I don’t think I’ve ever been on this path
before. This doesn’t look like what’s on the map and where we should be.” Of
course you are smart enough to never go hiking by yourself so the person you
are hiking with is saying, “We should have turned left back there.” “No, no,”
you respond. “We should turn right here.” You begin arguing about which way you
are supposed to be going. Finally you are certain that you have found the right
path, and you are following it, but it gets narrower, and narrower and stops at
the edge of a cliff. It is at that point that the nagging little thing that is in
the back of your mind burst upon your consciousness and you realize that you
are lost. You are lost in bear country, and it is afternoon, and it is going to
get dark soon.
All you know to do is to retrace
that trail because that is not going anywhere and you turn around and you see
coming down the trail this guy in a funny hat. Sure enough it is a park ranger.
Well, what a relief. He comes and he greets you and he looks at you in a way
that you know, disdain is not the right word for it, but he knows you are lost.
And he has seen this before. So he just looks at you and he says, “Follow me.”
Then he turns around and heads on down the path and you follow doing your best
to keep up. But then he starts going through some hard territory. Some of those
paths are kind of hard to climb up over and he seems to be going up hill, not
down hill. You are certain that he has made some mistakes along the way. He is
not going where you want to go. Finally decide that you just can’t follow this
one any more because he is not taking you where you want to go. So you head off
on another path. Of course you follow that for a while but sooner or later ends
up at the edge of a cliff. So you take a deep breath and you turn around and
you start heading back. And there he is just calmly looking at you and says’
“follow me.”
And you follow him again. This
happens several times because if you are anything like me you think you know
where you are supposed to be going. But ultimately you end up having to follow
him because there is no other way. And the problem is that you don’t really
know where he is going. You know where you want to go, you want to go back to
your car so you can go back to your hotel so you can get out of these shoes and
you can just relax. He may be going on a circle to check for all the other
hikers that are lost and you are just part that journey. Or maybe he knows you
don’t have enough time to get back down to your hotel and he is taking you to a
shelter. You don’t know. You end up having to trust that somehow he knows
better than you do.
That’s kind of how it is with God
and with Christ, even for the disciples. When Jesus comes and says to Simon and
Andrew, “Follow me,” they drop their nets and follow right away. But even they
at one point question where he is going.
When Jesus tells them that now it is time to go to Jerusalem they look
at him and say, “Jerusalem? They’ll kill you in Jerusalem.” Of course they were
right but Jesus still had to go to Jerusalem. And they all did ultimately
follow him there.
Probably the person most famous
for disobeying God was Jonah in our first reading. We only read a little part
of this wonderful little book. It is when he has gotten the second call from
God. Many of you may only know Jonah as the one who got swallowed by the whale,
so I am going to tell you this wonderful story.
It is a very short book of the
Bible. You can read it half an hour when you get home. Do take out your Bible
and read it. It is a wonderful.
The first thing to know is that it
is not a historical document. It is a fable. And the way you know it is a fable
is that it has all the aspects of a fable. There are amazing animals, there is
exaggeration, there is irony and there is humor. Also historians have tried to
identify who this person Jonah was, but he doesn’t occur anywhere else. So we
will treat it as a fable, but it is a wonderful and profound story.
Jonah is a prophet; he has dedicated
his life to God to be a prophet in Israel. Then God speaks to him. It is
presented in the same format as the one used for all the prophets, ”God said to
Jonah.” He is told to go to Nineveh and that God will tell him what to say. That’s
pretty simple and clear - go to Nineveh. The problem is, Nineveh was the
capital city of Assyria and Assyria was Israel’s mortal enemy. It was an empire
that had destroyed Israel several times. It was kind of like having God go up
to someone in Israel right now and tell them, “I want you to go and preach in Tehran,
the capital of Iran.” Right? Now you’d have lots of reasons to not do that. You
might think that it is dangerous. You might think that they won’t listen. You
might have all kinds of reasons not to go. But none of those were Jonah’s
reason. You’ll learn at the end for Jonah’s reason for not wanting to go.
So Jonah didn’t want to go to
Nineveh. Jonah would have gone east to go to Nineveh instead he goes west. He
goes to the coast and gets on the first ship going as far away as possible.
Probably to what is today called Spain. Can you hear him saying, “I want to get
as far away from here as possible. I want to get away from Nineveh, away from
God, I’m going to run away.” (Have any of you felt like running away from God?)
He gets out in the boat and a big
storm comes up. Now remember Jonah is the religious person. Everybody else on the
ship, all the sailors on the ship, would be considered gentiles or pagans,
believing in all kinds of different gods. But on the ship when the storm comes
up Jonah is sleeping in the bottom and all of the other guys are praying to
their gods. Each one is praying to his own god trying to stop the storm.
Finally they decide somebody on this ship must have done something to anger
some god to have a storm like this. So they pull lots. It turns out that Jonah
gets the lot and they all look at him and say, “What did you do?” cause they
know that he is a follower of Yahweh. Well, he explains he is running away and
he says it is my fault so throw me overboard. These gentile pagans say we can’t
do that. We can’t throw you into the ocean. Well the storm just gets worse and
finally the crew says, “Okay, it is not our fault, we are not responsible for
this blood.” And they throw him into the ocean.
And the storm stops and Jonah
sinks down into the ocean. Along comes a giant fish, sometimes translated as a
whale. The giant fish comes and swallows him. Now he is inside the body of the
whale or giant fish, and you know what he does? Now if I were thrown off of a
boat and swallowed by a fish I would probably be pretty upset. Jonah however
then sings a song of praise to God for God’s faithfulness. Go figure.
And then the fish takes Jonah to
the shoreline and lets him out. And that’s when we hear the reading for today. God
says for a second time, “Jonah, go to Nineveh and I will tell you what to say.
Tell them that I am going to destroy them in 40 days unless they repent.” So
this time Jonah realizes there is no way to escape God so he goes to Nineveh. He
gets there and he has the most phenomenal ministry! He goes and he spends just
one day in this huge city walking around telling people that Yahweh is going to
destroy them. Even though this city is the center of worship for a goddess and
they don’t have any belief in Yahweh. When he goes around and he tells them
that they are going to be destroyed everyone goes, “Oh my goodness, we did…
well yes” They all get their ashes and sackcloth. When the king hears about it
they have a fast and nobody, including the animals, are suppose to eat or drink
all day as a sign of their penance. What an amazing ministry. Now you have to
remember that in the normal story of the prophets in the Bible they go and prophesy
in Israel to people who are supposedly followers of Yahweh they are never
listened to. But here in this gentile evil city they repent!
You’d think that would make Jonah
happy. It’s the most amazing ministry anywhere. But he’s not. He goes up on the
hillside and looks over Nineveh and God decides not to destroy Nineveh. And you
know what? Jonah is ticked off. Jonah is really angry at God. He says, “That’s
why I didn’t want to come here. I knew they would repent and I knew that if
they repented that you are a God of mercy and then you wouldn’t destroy them.”
He was angry at them. They are the enemy. He wants them destroyed. He doesn’t
want God to save them. And then the whole little book, with all the humor in it
ends with God talking about his love for all the people and how wouldn’t
destroy them, and the animals.
So it is a story of how we as
human beings sometimes have a different idea of what we want to have happen
then what God does. Sometimes our plans are not God’s plans. And sometimes we
get really angry with God because God’s not doing it the way we think God
should be doing it. Sometimes we feel really powerless. Sometimes things in our
lives overwhelm us. We feel that we have no control, that we have no power. When
we have those times where we feel powerless we need to remember the psalm
today. It is one of my favorite psalms. There is a lot in it that I like, but
the one line that stand out today says, “and power belongs to God.” God is the
one with the power and when we find ourselves lost, and powerless there is only
one thing to do, to acknowledge our powerlessness.
Now sometimes the thing that we
have the least power over is our own habits. To acknowledge that and realize
that it is only God, it is only Christ, that can lead us to sanity, to health,
to wholeness and to deal with whatever situation we are in. It is then that we
need to give our lives over to God and to follow wherever God is taking us. No
matter what the path looks like and even if it is not what we think it is
supposed to be. We follow and have faith and trust.
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