Tasting the Gruel of Love

Second Chances

Dr. Larry Thorson*
August 30, 2009

Jonah 3:1-10

1 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: 2 "Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you."

3 Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. 4 Jonah began by going a day's journey into the city, proclaiming, "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown." 5 The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.

    6 When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. 7 Then he issued a proclamation in Nineveh:
       "By the decree of the king and his nobles:
       Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. 8 But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. 9 Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish."

10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.

We’re doing a study of the funny little book of Jonah this summer and if you remember, the story begins when God calls to Jonah…“Go to the city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” And then Jonah does what most Presbyterians do when the nominating committee asks them to serve as an officer - He runs away... in the exact opposite direction—because when the going gets tough... the tough get the heck outta there. Jonah hops a ship headed down to Tarschich.

But running away from God only makes his life miserable because think about it, one can only run so far from God and who better knows what’s best for us than God? In Jonah’s case God sends a big storm that threatens the life of the ship and its crew forcing the crew to throw him overboard. At that point Jonah’s life seems to have gone down just about as far as it can go. Have you ever felt like you were in that place?

One of the things in Jonah’s life is that when things are looking down, God seems to be up to something great. When he gets thrown overboard God provides a great fish that swallows him up. Normally that would kill you. But the point of the story is not whether a human can survive three days inside a big fish, the point is surviving would take a miracle. For three days and three nights, Jonah had nothing else to do but pray to God and wonder what would become of his life. And God hears him. He hears him and loves him and refuses to let him go. So God causes the fish to spit Jonah back onto dry land, and Jonah is rescued from his rebellion and death.

If I was Jonah, getting a second chance in life would be pretty exciting. It shouldn’t be too hard to imagine what Jonah must now be thinking. “Ah-ha! I’m alive. I’m covered in fish vomit, but I’m alive. God heard my prayer and he saved me. I should do something about this. I should write this down, I should write my spiritual memoirs, I’ll call it ‘Tuesdays with Jonah.’ But heck, why stop with just the story. I should build a church, right here where God delivered me, on the beach. Beautiful location, there’s lots of parking. I’ll call it the Church of the Big Fish, because that won’t be at all confusing. And we’ll do baptisms by throwing people off boats, and we’ll have testimonies from pagan sailors,” and so forth...

It’s not hard to imagine that Jonah wants to get started on his new life. He wants to move on to the bigger and better things, which is where we pick up our story from Jonah 3, verse 1.

1 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: 2 "Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you."

Wait a minute. Haven’t we heard that message before? Nineveh? Again? Ever get into a really heated argument with someone you love about a life or death situation, like whether or not you forgot to take out the trash? And maybe you did forget, but you know that it was because you were busy with something really important like programming the Tivo, so you try to distract them with other things. “Speaking of take out, are you hungry? Maybe we should get out more...” All in the hopes that they will kind of forget about it and move on.

Well, in this case, God has not moved on. God is not going to just forget Nineveh and calls Jonah a second time to the same place, “Jonah, I want you to go to the great city of Nineveh.”

“Go” is one of the most fundamental verbs in the Christian faith. Unfortunately, all too often we focus solely on the opposite word, “stop.” I hear this all the time when people tell their story of coming to faith, and they say something like, “I gave my life to Jesus and then I stopped...” and then give me the list of sins they’ve tried to put off.

I believe that it’s a really, really good thing to put off habits and behaviors that are sinful or harmful or not of God. But the heart of Christian discipleship is not the word stop. If it was, we’d all be better off just staying home and hiding in the bathroom. The heart of Christian discipleship is the word “go.”

When God calls Abraham, he says, I want you to leave behind your city, your family, your stuff.... and “Go.” When God calls Moses he says , I want you to stop being a shepherd in Midian and “Go” back to Egypt. After his resurrection, Jesus told his followers, “Go and while you are going make disciples”.

At the heart of Christianity there is a movement, an outward focus, a going that we can easily forget as we face the demands of our lives, but God doesn’t forget why he has called and saved Jonah... to go...

And where is Jonah called to go? To Nineveh, which, as you know, is not a good place to be going. Nineveh is like sin-city. It’s beyond sin-city. It’s Vegas times a million. It makes a red light district look like Disneyland.

Nineveh is simply too screwed up, messed up, washed up for a good and holy God to have anything to do with it. You see, Nineveh is not just the place you don’t want to go, it’s the place that we think is simply out of God’s reach. It’s the friend or family member you’ve prayed for but never seems to change. It’s the peer or colleague who laughs at your faith or how you live. It’s the person you try to love but just responds like a jerk. It’s the situation that never gets any better... that never has hope.

God says, “That’s where we are going.” And when you get there, God says, I have a new message for you.

If you remember back to the first time God called Jonah, he told him to “Go to the great city of Nineveh” and do what?... “Preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” Now God says in essence, “I still want you to go to the Nineveh, but when you get there I want you to stop and listen closely to me, because I have a particular message for the people of Nineveh, one that you might not expect… one that you might not come up with on your own... one that might surprise you... because God is up to something great. And so…verse 3 “Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh.”

But just because we obey God doesn’t mean the circumstances are going to be any less daunting. As soon as Jonah arrives in Nineveh, the reality of this situation sets in...

“Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. 4 Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown."

Jonah travels one third of the way into town and stops. He’s probably already frustrated; he’s probably seen more sin and evil than he can stand. And so he stops and gives what may be the shortest sermon in human history. It’s 8 words long—only 6 if you read it in the original Hebrew. A six word sermon... you’re thinking, if only we could be so lucky.

And it’s an incredibly vague message. It lacks all the characteristic features of Old Testament prophecy. There is no word from the Lord, there is no naming of sins, there is no appeal for the victims of injustice. And most importantly, there is no mention of God. What happened to “Go and proclaim the message I give you?” What’s going on here?

A number of scholars think that even though Jonah obeys, he is still unable to see any possible good coming out of this situation. He seems to be caught up in what we might call, the “no way” list. All of us have some kind of “no way” list in regard to what we think God can do. Jonah’s would go something like this... The messenger is unfit. The message is too short. The city is too large. The culture is too foreign. The audience is too wicked. The time frame is too limited. It’s all the reasons why there is “no way” that I can make any difference in Nineveh. No way.

The nominating committee asks you to serve and you pull out your “no way” list. I know because more than one of you have given me your list. It won’t do any good to serve as an officer because there’s no way God can use me. I don’t have my life together yet. I wouldn’t know the right words to say. People wouldn’t want to listen to me. People aren’t going to change anyway. Maybe there’s something that made you stop expecting, believing, hoping, praying...

But you see, whenever we think things are heading down, down, down, God is always up to something great. “No way could God do something in a wicked city like Nineveh. After Jonah’s one day march and six word sermon, the text says, “The Ninevites believed God.”

These were the people farthest away from God, the people least likely to believe who came to believe in God. And not just some of the people, it’s all of the people, even though Jonah is only 1/3 of the way through town.

And they didn’t just believe in God... “They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.” Sackcloth was an abrasive covering made of goat hair that was worn in public as a sign of repentance.

Does that sound like something a respectable person would do? Is that something you would do? Well here, even the people of privilege and power are doing this. Think of Donald Trump publically fasting. These are public acts of conversion made by all the people of Nineveh.

But God didn’t just reach the greatest and the least...

6 When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust.

This is the same king of Nineveh, of whom the prophet Nahum wrote, “Nothing can heal you; your wound is fatal. All who hear the news about you clap their hands at your fall.”

But the people of Nineveh were so passionate about God, about turning their lives over to him, they even made the animals repent. I’m not making this up. It’s all part of this story; a story filled with surprises.

But the best surprise is still to come. Look at what God does in Nineveh...10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.

Do you see it? Do you get it now? The book of Jonah is not a great tragedy that ends with a no way, not possible. It’s a great comedy where joy and laughter and new life win the day. When God delivered Jonah from the depths of the sea, the joke was on sin and death. And here, when God delivered Nineveh from the depths of their sin, the joke is on Jonah. The joke is on those of us who stop believing that God can reach the unreachable. The joke is on those of us who trade in a God for whom all things are possible for a God of measureable, expected, sensible outcomes, when our God is and always will be a God of immeasurable grace, of unexpected mercy, of impossible outcomes.

Because God doesn’t look at Nineveh and say “no way, not possible.” He says, “I am the Lord, who rescues people from their sins, and I’m going to do something in your days that you would not believe if you were told.”

This is not about having an agenda, or forcing a conversion. If you will listen to God, He will give you the message when you get there. Will you go? The God of anything’s possible is waiting for you to join him. And the things you’ll see if you give your life to God’s mission to reach Nineveh will make your faith so much deeper and stronger than ever would be if you were to just stay back on that beach, saved but just sitting there. The real Jonah adventure awaits.

*Sermon adapted from a sermon preached by Scott Scruggs on November 23, 2008 at the Menlo Park Presbyterian Church entitled “Lost and Found”.