Jonah, Week 1

A Guide of Sorts:

A word about how to use this. Each week picks up where Sunday left off. The sermon can only hold so much, so these six mornings go back into the chapter we just read and sit with the parts we ran past. Read the day's short passage first, in your own Bible if you have one handy. Then read the reflection. Then pray, in the words here or your own. Six days, Monday through Saturday, and then we gather again.

One thread runs under all of it. Every week I am going to keep asking the same question, and I want you to keep asking it too: what is the word that has come to Hermiston First? Not to me. Not to you alone. To us. Jonah is a book about a whole city hearing a word and deciding what to do with it. So are we.

Jonah, Week 1:

Monday:
“Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.”
Jonah 1:2

We should be honest about who Nineveh was. This was not a symbol. It was the capital of Assyria, the empire that had ground the northern kingdom of Israel into the dirt. If you were the first audience for this book, Nineveh was the name of the boot that had been on your neck. When God says their wickedness has come up before me, the people hearing it would have nodded hard. Finally. About time.

Here is the part that makes the book so strange, and so much smarter than we give it credit for. By the time anyone sat down and wrote Jonah, Nineveh was already gone. Long gone. Rubble and memory. Everybody reading it knew that. So this was never a news report about a real prophet on a real Tuesday. It is a story told on purpose, later, to a people who already knew how the empire ended, in order to ask them a question they did not want to answer: what would you have done if God had wanted to spare them?

That is what makes Jonah a mirror instead of a history lesson. The wickedness is real. The violence was real. And God looks at the worst address in the known world and says, go there, because I have noticed them, and noticing is the first move of mercy.

It is easy to want God to notice the people who hurt us only so God can settle the score. Jonah wanted that. I have wanted that. This week the book starts to pry our fingers off of it.

So here is the first turn of our question. If God noticed Nineveh, who has God noticed around Hermiston that we would rather God overlook?

A Prayer for Today
God, you notice everyone, including the ones I have written off, including the ones who earned it. That is harder to swallow than I want to admit. Start working on me anyway. Amen.

Tuesday:
“But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea…”
Jonah 1:4

The word the writer uses for what God does to the wind is a violent one. Hurled. Thrown. It is the same verb that shows up again in a few verses when the sailors hurl the cargo into the sea, and again when they finally hurl Jonah over the side. Once you see it, the chapter starts to feel like a game of catch nobody wants to be playing. God hurls the wind. The sailors hurl the freight. Then they hurl the prophet. Everything is getting thrown.

I grew up being taught that the storm was God's punishment. Jonah disobeyed, so God got angry, so God sent weather to make him pay. I do not think that is what is going on here, and I do not think it is how God tends to work.

Read it again and notice: the storm does not sink Jonah. The storm wakes everyone else up. It gets the sailors praying. It gets the truth out of Jonah's mouth. It is less a verdict than a summons. Something is chasing Jonah, and it is chasing him back toward the thing he was made for. Things get turbulent. The turbulence is the sign that something has to give.

I have had storms I was sure were God punishing me. Looking back, most of them were just the sound of a wrong direction finally catching up with me. And in every one of them, when I got quiet enough to notice, God was not up in the clouds throwing lightning. God was down in the boat.

What storm is loud in our common life right now? And what if it is not a verdict, but an alarm clock?

A Prayer for Today
God, when the wind picks up, help me stop asking what I did to deserve it and start asking what you are trying to wake me up to. I am listening. Amen.

Wednesday:
“The captain came and said to him, ‘What are you doing sound asleep? Get up, call on your god!’”
Jonah 1:6

This is one of the funniest and most cutting moments in the whole chapter, and we blew right past it on Sunday. A pagan sea captain has to walk down into the hold, shake the prophet of the living God awake, and tell him to pray. The professional believer is asleep. The outsider is doing his job for him.

It gets sharper in the original. Back at the start of the chapter, God told Jonah to get up and go. The captain uses the very same words. Get up. Call on your god. This rough sailor, who does not know Yahweh from a hole in the ground, ends up repeating God's own command back to the prophet who ignored it. The sermon Jonah refused to preach gets preached to Jonah, by the last person you would expect to preach it.

I have been the sleeping prophet more times than I would like to count. There have been long stretches where the people with no church background in the room were more awake to God than I was, and they were the ones nudging me. Feed him. Call her back. Show up. Get up. They would not have used any of my vocabulary for it. They were doing my job better than me anyway.

The church does not have a monopoly on the voice of God. Sometimes the wake-up call comes wearing a name tag from a job we look down on.

Who has been the captain in your life, the one who told you to get up when you did not want to hear it? And who might God be sending to wake this whole congregation up, that we are too proud to listen to?

A Prayer for Today
God, keep me from sleeping through the very thing you are doing. And when you send someone to wake me, help me be humble enough to thank them instead of arguing. Amen.

Thursday:
“Come, let us cast lots, so that we may know on whose account this calamity has come upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.”
Jonah 1:7

The sailors do a very human thing. They want to know whose fault this is. So they cast lots, which is the ancient version of drawing straws, trusting that the outcome will point a finger. And it does. It points at Jonah.

Then they interrogate him, and their questions are worth slowing down on. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? Of what people are you? Four quick questions, and every one of them is really asking the same thing. Who are you. They can feel that this man is carrying something, and they want him to say it out loud.

I think most of us spend a fair amount of energy making sure the lot never falls on us. We stay busy, we stay useful, we keep the conversation on other people, we manage how we are seen. And every so often life casts the lots anyway. A diagnosis. A layoff. A comment from someone who sees us more clearly than we are comfortable with. And suddenly we are the one standing in the middle of the deck getting asked, so, who are you really.

Being found out is not the disaster we think it is. It is often the first honest moment we have had in a while. The sailors are not trying to destroy Jonah. They are trying to understand him. Sometimes the people asking hard questions about us are not our enemies. They are the ones finally paying attention.

When the lot falls on this congregation, when the community looks at us and asks who are you really, what do we want the true answer to be?

A Prayer for Today
God, I spend so much effort not getting caught. Give me the nerve to be known instead. Ask me your questions. I will try not to change the subject. Amen.

Friday:
“‘I am a Hebrew,’ he replied. ‘I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.’”
Jonah 1:9

Cornered, Jonah finally answers, and his answer is a perfect little creed. I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land. Every word of it is true. He could put it on a business card. It is theologically flawless.

It is also completely hollow, and the writer knows it, and wants us to catch it. Jonah says he worships the God who made the sea, while he is on a boat, in the middle of that very sea, running from that very God. He confesses the maker of the dry land while doing everything he can to never set foot on the dry land God actually sent him to. He has the doctrine down cold. He is just not living in any of it.

This one gets under my collar, honestly, because it is the sin I am most prone to. I can say all the right things about God. I have degrees that say I can say them. I can give you the God of the sea and the dry land in three languages. And I have absolutely stood in the middle of my own running with a flawless creed coming out of my mouth. Knowing the right words about God is not the same thing as going where God sends you. It never has been.

The scary part is that Jonah's confession is not a lie. It is worse than a lie. It is a true thing said by a man doing the opposite of it.

Where do our words as a church and our direction as a church not match? What do we say we believe on Sunday that our week does not back up?

A Prayer for Today
God, I am good with the right words. Help me be good with the right direction. Close the gap between what I say about you and where I actually go. Amen.

Saturday:
“Then the men feared the Lord even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.”
Jonah 1:16

Here is how the chapter ends, and it is astonishing. They throw Jonah into the sea. The sea goes still, immediately, like a tantrum that suddenly stops. And the sailors, these rough, pagan, written-off men, are so struck by what they have just witnessed that they offer sacrifices to Yahweh and make vows to him, right there on the deck.

Sit with that. Jonah was sent to convert a city and refused. And before he ever gets within a thousand miles of that city, a whole crew of sailors gets converted by accident, in the middle of the ocean, watching the one thing Jonah did halfway. Jonah's mission succeeds on the wrong people, in the wrong place, without his consent, almost against his will. The grace he was hoarding leaks out and lands on the outsiders first.

This is the book showing its hand early. Over and over, the people who are supposed to be on the inside come in last, and the people we would never expect get there first. It happened on the boat. It is going to happen, spectacularly, when we get to Nineveh.

I have watched this in my own life so many times it has stopped surprising me and started humbling me. The grace I thought was mine to manage kept showing up in people I had quietly counted out.

Tomorrow we go into the belly, into the darkest and most personal part of this whole book. Come with this question in your pocket: where have you already seen God get to somebody before the church did? Be grateful for it. Then come find out what God does with a man who has finally run all the way out of exits.

A Prayer for Today
God, you are always out ahead of us, reaching people we were too slow or too proud to reach. Thank you. Help this church be glad about that instead of jealous of it. Amen.