The
good news for me today is that Jonah preached the worst sermon in the Bible and
he just so happened to have more success than all the Old Testament prophets
put together, so if today’s sermon is really lousy it may not matter.
I
still remember the worst sermon I ever heard. It was so bad that I could not
shake it from my mind a day later or a week later or even today—years later. This
wasn’t just your typical, unremarkable sermon or a sermon that said things with
which I disagree. I’ve heard plenty of those sermons, and even though I find
myself cringing and sometimes resisting the urge to bang my head with a Bible I
can at least chock those up to differences in theology; not just bad preaching.
However, this particular bad sermon was a problem because the pastor, who was a
guest preacher at the church where Kate and I were worshiping, made the sermon
into a performance—not about God, but about—well, there’s no other way to put
this—it was all about him. He played some songs he wrote, while singing
along with the piano. He talked a lot about his life. The only
mentions of God were segues between his experiences. He made the sermon all
about himself. It was horrible to sit through.
The
funny thing about that sermon, however, is that it stuck. In fact, after that
Sunday morning an idea started to germinate in the back of my mind, and it was
this: maybe some of the best preaching is actually, strangely, really bad
preaching. Maybe even when the pastor tries to make it about him and her self
God will work through that person to say something that gets the cogs turning.
Then, I realized, we have the perfect model for this in scripture: Jonah! Who
better to remind us that neither a person’s motives nor their preaching acumen
matters? God is going to work through the sad, sorry preacher no matter how
much they refuse to listen.
This
is good news, because there is plenty of bad preaching out there. There is plenty
of preaching about the news or about the pastor him or her self. There is
preaching completely out of touch with your lives, completely out of touch with
the lives of young people, or old people, completely out of touch with the
poor… or the rich; preaching unwilling to focus on the Gospel and unable to
convey the message of salvation by grace through faith; preaching that forgets
about Jesus, preaching that turns political; preaching that tries to use God’s
word for its own ends.
And
yet, God works through that. That is the fascinating thing. There are those who
have beliefs I find simply wrong that nonetheless experience the fullness of
God’s word and who, through that word, come to know the God who created them,
died for them and will raise them when time comes to an end. There are plenty
of Christians who believe all sorts of things in large part because of their pastors
who tell them all sorts of things—things that find their justification in some
odd verse here or there in scripture but seem completely out of touch with the
God we experience in communion and the forgiveness of sins—but you know what?
In spite of that, these people are hearing and learning about the God behind it
all—behind all the nonsense and the pastors’ egos.
Jonah was a horrible pastor.
He
wanted nothing to do with those Assyrians who, he believed, deserved to die
because of their heathen ways and warring against God’s chosen people. To
Jonah, Nineveh
represented everything that was wrong in the world—all the undesirable peoples
that were acting contrary to God’s word; people, who God tells us, “did not
know their right hand from their left.”
Into
this mix walks Jonah, still 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,” he preaches. It 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. You have forty days to get your affairs in order then you
will be smitten. Sorry, chaps.
The
funny thing—well, there are so many funny things about Jonah, but one of the
things that is funny about this story—is that the people of Nineveh listen to
this horrible sermon and they believe it immediately. The king even goes to the
extravagantly unnecessary step of putting not just his people in sackclothes of
repentance but doing the same thing to their animals as well. I can imagine
walking around the giant city of Nineveh
with its one hundred and twenty thousand people wearing potato bags with goats
and sheep and chickens looking just the same. Now, that would be a sight. Oddly, they do this even without a promise
that this will appease God. Jonah didn’t even tell them to repent. Instead, the
king seems to wonder aloud, “Who knows? God may relent and change his mind.”
It’s like he figures it can’t hurt, so they might as well try.
So,
to recap: Jonah preaches a horrible sermon, the people repent—and how!—and God
changes his mind; the city of Nineveh
is saved, which is where we find Jonah by the final chapter of the story. It is
here we discover that Jonah is not just a bad preacher but that he is also a
vindictive person. He doesn’t care that the people repented. He wants
bloodshed, he wants vengeance, he wants those outsiders—those enemies of Israel—shown
the true force of God’s wrath. He wants fire to fall from heaven, like with Sodom and Gomorrah.
He does not understand that salvation requires forgiveness for our misdeeds
because he cannot see past the other-ness of the Ninevites. They are bad; he is
good. A just God should punish them. Jonah, unlike Nineveh, cannot change his mind.
A
comic strip appeared on my Facebook feed two weeks ago from a group called
Radio Free Babylon. They put out these daily comics called “Coffee With Jesus”—I
don’t often do advertisement but check them out if you’re on
Facebook and you won’t be disappointed. Anyway, this comic strip always has
somebody talking with Jesus over coffee, and on the 29th of October
the strip looked like this:
 |
| Check out RFB on Facebook here. |
Isn’t
that just it? We make it complicated. We make it about the evil of others. We
sit, like Jonah on the hill, waiting for our enemies to be destroyed. Our inner
sense of justice yearns for that kind of vengeance, because—honestly—they
deserve it. They deserve death. I can hardly say this without thinking of that
scene from Lord of the Rings where Frodo tells Gandalf that Bilbo should have
killed Gollum—OK, I just completely lost all of you who don’t know Lord of the
Rings so feel free to plan your grocery lists in the next 20 seconds of the
sermon. But anyway, Gandalf responds to Frodo with one of those epic J.R.R Tolkien
philosophical segues, saying, “Many that live deserve death, and some that die
deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo?”
Can
you give it to them, Jonah? Can we?
We need to get off
our ethical high hills. We need to stop preaching bad sermons, because even
when we preach the opposite God will work through our inadequacy. We need to
applaud Nineveh
because repentance takes admitting that there is something wrong with us in the
first place. That is the harder path. It’s the path Kevin has to take to ask
Jesus for forgiveness. It’s the path Bilbo took in sparing Gollum’s life. It’s
the path before us every day of our lives, because all of us are both in need
of forgiveness and forgiving. All of us are preaching bad sermons. Not just
Jonah. Not just that pastor playing piano and singing his songs. Not just me.
You too. Each of you occasionally preach—to your friends and families, to
people you know and people you do not, on the internet and in your living
rooms—and sometimes you preach poorly. It doesn’t matter. God will work through
you. God will upend the natural order of the world in spite of you. That is the
promise Jonah never knew. God is at work, changing things, doing things,
forgiving things, and our words—though necessary—only work through the one who
gives them meaning.
Thanks be to God for that.
Thanks be to God for that.
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