Today’s readings contrast two different responses to God’s
call.
In the reading from Mark’s gospel, Jesus addresses two
different pairs of fishermen – first, Peter and Andrew, and then, James and
John – and says to them: “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.”
And they drop what they are doing and follow Jesus.
Jonah’s response to God is completely different. God said to
Jonah, “Get up and go to Nineveh,” and Jonah got up and bought himself a ticket
to Tarshish. Nineveh was on the eastern end of Mediterranean, and Tarshish was
on the western end. In other words, God told Jonah to go one way, but Jonah ran
as hard and fast as he could in the opposite direction.
Which story is more like your life? I don’t know about you,
but I’ve been like Jonah more often than I’ve been like Peter and his buddies. More
often than not, when God tells me to do this, I do that. When God says, “Jump,”
and I dive for cover. When God says, “Put service above self,” and I just keep
going my own selfish way.
So what do you suppose made Jonah so reluctant to go to
Nineveh?
To understand that we have to know a little history. Nineveh
was a city on the east bank of the Tigris river in Assyria. In the 8th
century BC, the Assyrians destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and also
went to war with the Southern Kingdom of Judah, although Judah lasted another
200 years or so.
In other words, God was telling Jonah to go and preach to
his worst enemies, to proclaim God’s judgment on them. Even worse, Jonah had to
give them the chance to repent, to change their ways, and to escape God’s
terrible judgment.
The Assyrians had had no mercy on Jonah’s kinsmen and women
in the Northern Kingdom, but now Jonah was giving the Ninevites the opportunity
to pray to God to be merciful to them.
Imagine the conversation between Jonah and God: “You want me
to go where!? To those rascals, those rats?! Do you know what they did to the
Northern Kingdom? Imagine what they will do to me when I go and proclaim your
message to them! They don’t even speak Hebrew. You mean I’ll have to learn
Ninevish to speak to them?!”
And that’s when Jonah bought his ticket to Tarshish.
The book of Jonah has many messages for us.
One is that we cannot confine or constrain God’s mercy and
love. We’re fine when God loves people
like us, people who look like us, people who speak our language and have our
values.
There’s something in every human heart that makes us just a
little suspicious of people who are different from us, whose skin is a
different color, who speak a different language, who pray in a different way,
who perhaps order their political and economic affairs differently.
I hope you’ve had the opportunity to see the wonderful new
film Selma. There’s a great scene in
it in which Dr. King is talking to his wife, Coretta. She’s clearly worried
about what might happen to him if he continues leading the civil rights
movement. And he says, “One day I’ll have a church in a small college town and
do some teaching at the college.” That was what Dr. King really wanted to do,
but God had other ideas. In Ralph Abernathy’s autobiography he says that Dr.
King rode to Selma in the back seat of his car curled up in the fetal position,
but when they arrived at the site of the march, King got out of the car and strode
to the front of the marchers. I don’t believe that King wanted to go to Selma;
he was a reluctant prophet, a reluctant warrior for peace. But he heard God’s
call, and he answered it.
During my last year at Yale Divinity School, I had the
opportunity to meet Billy Graham. It was a very brief meeting, but I was deeply
impressed with him. This was 1982; President Reagan had been president for only
two years; the Cold War was entering its last phase.
Graham told the story of his recent visit to the Soviet
Union. He had had the opportunity to meet with the Politburo, the men who ran
the USSR. And he came back to the US believing that they sincerely sought peace
with America.
Was Graham naïve? Perhaps. But what a contrast Billy Graham
presents with Jonah! As a young man Graham had preached about the evil of the
Soviet system. He had preached about a war between the US and the Soviets as
the battle of Armageddon in the book of Revelation. And then he heard God
telling him to go to Moscow and speak with the Soviet leadership, to talk to
them about God’s message of peace, of spears being turned into pruning hooks,
of missiles and tanks being turned into money for agriculture and education and
health care.
And what happened? Reagan and Gorbachev met and began to
negotiate down their arsenals of nuclear weapons.
Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not saying for a minute that
Billy Graham ended the Cold War. But isn’t it remarkable that this evangelist,
this conservative Christian, heeded God’s call to go to the capital of his
greatest enemy and tell them about God’s good news?
So if Billy Graham can go to Moscow, can’t we at least go
across town and get to know the people who are different from us? Can’t we make
an effort to learn their language and share God’s message with those we do not
know?
When we hear and respond to God’s call there’s no telling
what might happen. The walls that separate us can fall. Hostile nations can
make peace. The lowly can be lifted up and the mighty brought down from their
places of power.
God’s message to Jonah was not that different from Jonah’s
message to Nineveh: Do you want mercy or judgment? Will you hear and heed God’s
message and change your ways or do you want to end up in a dark, cold place, a
place as stinky and nasty as a fish’s belly?
But even in that dark, cold place there is hope. It is the
message of the Psalmist: “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee
from your presence? 8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make
my bed in Sheol, you are there. 9 If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, 10 even there your hand
shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. 11 If I say,
"Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become
night," 12 even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as
bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.” (Psalm 139)
Where can we go from God’s presence? Where can we go that
God does not pursue us with mercy and love? Nowhere. There is no place we can
go where God is not, no place where God will not hear our prayer and deliver
us.
This morning at the 10:45 am service we will be baptizing
Oliver Abrao and Madeline Melien. The next part of my sermon is for them, but
you are invited to listen, too.
Oliver and Madeline, today you are becoming a part of God’s
family, a part of this church.
Throughout your life God will be speaking to you. God is
going to summon you many times during your life. God is going to summon you to
love him and to love your neighbor. Sometimes God will speak to you in soft and
gentle tones, and sometimes God may have to shake the heavens to get your
attention.
Sometimes you will be like Peter and the fishermen and you
will hear God’s call and follow him. At other times you may be like Jonah and
resist God and even run away from God.
There will be times when you will feel just like Jonah did
in the belly of the fish. You will find yourself in a cold, dark place. You
will wonder where God is. But never forget this: God is with you. There is no
place you can go where God cannot find you. There is no prayer you pray that
God does not hear.
Today we are giving you several gifts: a candle, a cross, a
bottle containing some of the water from the baptismal font. And since this is
Las Vegas, we’re giving you a T shirt. But I hasten to add that it does not
say, “I was baptized at Christ Church and all I got was this lousy T shirt.”
But the most important gift you are receiving today is the
gift of the Holy Spirit. That is a gift that God gives to everyone who is
baptized.
The Holy Spirit will help you hear and heed God’s call. The
Spirit will bring you comfort and courage even in the darkest and coldest
places.
May God bless you and always give you a willing heart to
hear Jesus calling and follow him, because if you do, you will have the most
marvelous adventures.
Amen.
