Sunday, November 6, 2016

Jonah, the very worst elected person

Jonah chapters 1, 3, 4

            We need Jonah. Oh, how we need Jonah. This, this is the good news we need.
            Jonah was a terrible preacher, a god-awful prophet. He’s so awful that, looking at the book as a whole, it’s probably satire. It’s probably meant to be funny, because—like with most satire—the situation is so extravagantly backwards that it feels like there’s no way this could be serious. Jonah receives a word from God: Go to Nineveh. So he goes… to Tarshish; literally the other side of the known world. If he could have crossed the Atlantic Ocean that’s what he would have done.. Other prophets try to get out of their commitment—see Moses and the burning bush—but nobody goes to quite the lengths of Jonah to run away from what God was asking of him. So, it’s no surprise when God sends a storm and threatens the ship in which Jonah is fleeing. The sailors convert in a heartbeat—this is one of the funnier aspects of the Jonah story: No prophet has nearly as much success as Jonah in getting converts. He hardly has to try; in fact, he DOESN’T TRY. He literally does not seem to care. And here is God working through his hard head.
            You see, I’m pretty sure Jonah is satire, but—with most good satire—it’s also very true. God DOES work through our hard heads and often the faster we run away the more God pulls us back. When Jonah finally gets to the Assyrians in Nineveh it’s with great contempt in his heart. He hates the Assyrians. He believes they deserved to die for their heathen ways. They were people who, in the words of Jonah, “did not know their right hand from their left.”
Into this mix, finally, walks Jonah, dripping in whale vomit, and he preaches a momentous five word sermon that is long on judgment and without any promise: “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” The Hebrew verb for “overthrow” is haphak, which could mean that the city will be overthrown or that it will turn and repent. What Jonah seems to intend for ill, God means for good.
Jonah’s message might be the worst sermon in history. He completely misses the important part; the part where he tells them on whose authority this message comes—the prophetic introduction that always begins these kinds of sermons where the prophet says, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel” or something along those lines. Jonah makes it sound as if the message is just his idea and he doesn’t really offer any alternative. This is not turn or burn; it’s more like “Burn, suckaaaaazzzzz!” Or, put another way, you have forty days to get your affairs before God’s mighty smiting. Sorry, chaps.
And, yet, to the ears of the Assyrians this was a prophecy of their repentance. Absurdly enough, they listen and obey without a second thought. The king even goes to the extravagantly unnecessary step of putting sackclothes on the people AND the animals of the city. I can imagine walking around the giant city of Nineveh with its one hundred and twenty thousand people along with goats and sheep all wearing potato bags.
Jonah has more success than any other prophet in the history of the world, and he didn’t even want it. In fact, when he sees the “success” he is having he starts pouting. He retreats to a hilltop to watch, begging God to do the people in anyway!
            Not only is he a terrible preacher; he’s pretty much the worst person. Let’s be honest—and I don’t say this lightly—Jonah sucks.
            … But it’s Jonah that saves 120,000 people.
            Too often, we imagine that in order to change the world you need to be a great person. Heck, our ordination vows as pastors require us to pledge to live a life that is “above reproach,” which I take to mean that we are supposed to be the best people we can possibly be, which never happens because we are flawed creations and often as terrible as anyone else. I include myself in that category more often than I’d like to admit. Yet, God seems to work through broken people even more effectively than those who appear to be whole. God works through terrible sermons as well as great ones, which is some consolation for me, actually, come to think of it. God works through the worst things ever.
            Hey, you know what? We have one of those worst things ever coming up on Tuesday! And oddly enough, Jonah is also a story about election; not our election, thank God, but real election, which is to say it is about God choosing us. First, God appoints Jonah to bring this message to Nineveh. Then, in chapter 4, God makes two further appointments. Verses 6-7, “The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered.”
            The old Tyndale Bible, with its beautiful olde Englysh, says “And the lorde ordeyned a worme,” which I quite like and have inscribed in Hebrew on my ordination stole, because God is capable of not only ordaining—appointing, electing—worms like Jonah, but also actual worms alongside worms like me. It takes a special kind of humility to be ordained. That’s something human beings, including “ordained” ones, too often lack.
            On Tuesday you’re going to go vote for people who lack in humility; it goes with the territory. But more than focusing on the imperfections of candidates we need to remember who it is that effects true, good change in the world. It wasn’t Jonah, after all. Jonah was the Buffalo Bills of prophets—hopeless, terrible. Nothing should have changed (except the people of Nineveh should probably have killed him for his utter stupidity), and yet everything changed, because it was God that did the electing. It is God’s policies that matter, and God has more votes, a longer memory, and a larger view of justice than we have. God uses worms like Jonah as surely as he uses actual worms and worms like you and me.
            The ending of the book of Jonah is one of my favorite stories not just in the Bible but in all literature. This scene is astounding and beautiful and composed with such a deft touch that it bears reading a few times (or a few hundred) to get the impact. Chapter 4 begins with Jonah offering God thirty-nine words of complaint about Nineveh, culminating with Jonah’s final tantrum, “And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live” (4:3). Jonah is in full toddler tantrum mode—I should know, it sounds awfully familiar! Then comes the bush and the worm, which only puts Jonah in a fouler mood. Again he says “It is better for me to die than to live.” (4:8)
God says, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?”
Jonah doubles down a third time, “Yes, angry enough to die.”
Then God, having listened to Jonah’s thirty-nine words of complaint about Nineveh at the beginning of the chapter, concludes the book of Jonah by offering thirty-nine Hebrew words of his own. I’ll read them once more:
 “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” (4:10-11)
I love that the book of Jonah ends here, because it leaves us on edge waiting for a response. It feels like there should be more—some resolution, some further complaint from Jonah—but there’s not. This is it. This is the point of the book of Jonah. It’s about saving Nineveh from destruction. And who cares about the bush? Just Jonah.
And yet, our politics is that bush. It covers us from the elements, claims it will keep us safe from the world out there, and we are obsessed with that bush. We worry over that bush A LOT. What might become of it? What will happen if the bush doesn’t get treated how I believe it should? What if a worm starts eating away at its roots?
When we worry about our politics so much and when we put our ultimate trust in the principalities and powers of this world we begin to believe that our vote matters more than God’s. We trust in our election more than God’s election. We value bushes more than people. God is not amused. But God also uses us anyway, Jonah-like though we may be. While we’re sitting on our hills, waiting for the world to burn, and worried about our bushes, God is saving people. God is even using us to do it as we dig in our heals and drag our feet. It’s happening often in spite of us, because, like Jonah, we’re aren’t always very good prophets. We don’t want to go to Nineveh, and we’re worried about our stupid bushes.
Relax. God is concerned with the thing we are not: The human beings in need of salvation. You know, the things that matter? God doesn’t lose track of what matters. The bush lives, the bush dies, but people live on. People persevere by the grace of God. People will wake up on Wednesday morning and retreat under the cover of their bush if it is thriving and well or sit in fear of their shriveled bush if it comes to die. But, as Jonah should have realized, the bush doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t. What matters is the people. What matters is what God was doing while Jonah was pouting. This is not a story about a whale; it’s a story about a bush, or rather it’s a story of how the bush doesn’t matter; the people do. Even Nineveh, that great city, whose people don’t know their right hand from their left. Hmm… sounds like a metaphor.
            Sounds like a people who need saving. Sounds a lot like us.

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