Jonah, Week 2

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 2:

Monday:
“The Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah…”
Jonah 1:17

The word under the English here is worth knowing, because it is going to come back and back and back. The verb means to appoint, to assign, to have ready. God appointed the fish. Not zapped it into being as a punishment. Appointed it. Had it standing by.

This same verb shows up four times in the book. God appoints the fish. Later God appoints a plant to give Jonah shade. Then God appoints a worm to eat the plant. Then God appoints a scorching wind. Four appointments. Some of them feel like mercy and some of them feel like misery, and the book uses the exact same word for all of them on purpose. God is provisioning this whole story. Even the hard parts are being handed to Jonah by a God who is paying attention.

That reframes the fish completely. The fish is not the jaws of judgment closing on a bad man. The fish is the thing God had ready, the rescue that looks like being swallowed, the provision that arrives disguised as the end.

I have had a few appointed fish in my life. At the time every one of them felt like getting eaten alive. The job that fell apart. The bottom I hit. The dead truck in a parking lot. It was only later, sometimes years later, that I could see it had been standing by the whole time, sent to keep me from drowning in the direction I was headed.

What has been appointed to this congregation that we have been treating like a catastrophe? What if the thing we are most afraid of is the thing God had ready?

A Prayer for Today
God, help me tell the difference between being punished and being provided for, because from the inside they can feel exactly the same. Give me the patience to find out which one I am in. Amen.

Tuesday:
“I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me…”
Jonah 2:2

Here is something odd, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Jonah is still inside the fish when he prays this prayer. He has not been rescued yet. He is in the dark, in the deep, in the belly, no exit in sight. And the prayer he prays is a thanksgiving. It is all past tense. You answered me. You brought my life up. You heard my voice. He is thanking God for a rescue that, technically, has not happened yet.

That is either the most confused prayer in the Bible or the most faithful one, and I think it is the second. Jonah is not thanking God because he can see the way out. He cannot see anything. He is thanking God because he has decided that being heard in the dark already counts. That God being with him down here is already the answer, before the fish ever opens its mouth.

I do not always have that kind of faith and I am not going to pretend I do. Most of my prayers from the bottom have been of the get me out of here variety, not the thank you variety. But I have learned, slowly, that something shifts the moment you can say thank you before the circumstances change. Not because it makes the fish spit you out faster. It does not. But because it means you have stopped waiting to be grateful until you are safe.

Gratitude before rescue is not denial. It is trust with its eyes open.

Can this church give thanks for what God is doing among us before we can see how any of it turns out? That might be the truest test of whether we believe the word has really come.

A Prayer for Today
God, teach me to say thank you from inside the thing, not just after I am safely out of it. I trust that you have heard me, even here, even now. Amen.

Wednesday:
“The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head.”
Jonah 2:5

If Jonah's prayer sounds familiar, that is because almost none of it is original. Nearly every line is lifted from the Psalms. The waters closing in, the deep, the pit, being cast into the heart of the seas, crying out and being heard. Jonah is not composing something new down there. He is reciting. He is praying the tradition, the old words other people wrote in their own drownings long before his.

Some readers find that disappointing, like Jonah phoned it in even in his big prayer. I find it deeply comforting. Because here is a man at the absolute bottom, with no words of his own left, and what does he do? He reaches for the words the community handed him. The prayers he had heard a hundred times and half memorized. When he had nothing, the tradition prayed for him.

I have been in that exact place, where my own words were gone and all I had were the borrowed ones. The Lord's Prayer when I could not pray anything else. A hymn I did not even like that showed up in my head at three in the morning and would not leave. A psalm I had heard so many times it prayed itself when I could not. That is not weakness. That is the whole reason we memorize anything.

This is part of why we do this together. So that on the day you cannot find a single word of your own, there is a whole storehouse of them in you, put there by people who were in the belly before you and left the words behind on purpose.

What are the borrowed words this congregation is storing up in each other, for the days somebody among us cannot pray at all?

A Prayer for Today
God, on the days I have no words of my own, let the old ones rise up in me. Thank you for everyone who prayed them first and left them where I could find them. Amen.

Thursday:
“At the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever.”
Jonah 2:6

Before Jonah gets to any thank-you, he does something I think we skip too fast. He describes exactly how far down he went. The roots of the mountains. The bars of the earth shut behind him. Weeds around his head. He is drawing a map of the bottom, and he does not flinch from any of it.

There is a kind of prayer that rushes to the good news so fast it never actually tells the truth about the bad. We do it to comfort ourselves and we do it to comfort each other. It is fine, it is fine, God is good, moving on. And there is a place for that. But it is not what Jonah does here. Jonah takes a slow, unhurried inventory of the deep before he says one word about being lifted out.

I have learned, mostly the hard way, that you cannot skip that part. The gratitude does not stick if you have not first told the truth about the drowning. When I got sober, the recovery did not start with the good news. It started with an unflinching, humiliating, detailed inventory of exactly how far down I had gone and exactly who I had taken down with me. Only then did anything begin to grow back.

Naming the bottom is not wallowing. Wallowing stays there. Naming it is what you have to do first in order to leave.

Can this church tell the truth about its own low places, out loud, before we hurry to the part where God fixes everything? A congregation that cannot name its down is not ready to talk about its up.

A Prayer for Today
God, give me the courage to name the bottom honestly before I rush to the rescue. Not to stay there. To finally be able to leave it. Amen.

Friday:
“Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty.”
Jonah 2:8

Right in the middle of this beautiful prayer, Jonah gets a dig in. Those who worship worthless idols, he says, they forsake the love that could be theirs. Meaning, of course, other people. The pagans. The ones who do not know the true God like he does.

The joke, and it is absolutely a joke, is that the last actual idol-worshipers we met in this book were the sailors, and they had just finished converting. They prayed, they sacrificed, they made vows to Yahweh. The real idolaters in chapter one out-faithed the prophet. And now here is Jonah, in the belly, mid-rescue, taking a swipe at idolaters as if he is not the one who ran. He cannot help himself. Even at the bottom, even mid-miracle, he has to remind God which team he is on and which team he is not.

I wish I did not recognize this so well. There is something in me that, even in my lowest and most sincere moments of prayer, wants to slip in a quiet reminder that at least I am not like those people over there. It is such a small, human, ugly little move, and I do it in the middle of otherwise honest prayers all the time.

The teacher from Nazareth had a line about the speck in your neighbor's eye and the log in your own. Jonah is praying a lovely prayer with a whole tree sticking out of his face.

Where does our congregation, even at our most faithful, sneak in the comparison? At least we are not like that church, those people, that crowd. What would it cost us to drop it?

A Prayer for Today
God, catch me when I use my prayers to feel superior to somebody. Take the log out of my eye before I go pointing at anyone's speck. Amen.

Saturday:
“Then the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.”
Jonah 2:10

After the beautiful prayer, after deliverance belongs to the Lord, after all of that, here is how Jonah's rescue actually happens. The fish throws up. That is the word. It is not gentle. It is not a soft landing on a sunny beach with a rainbow. Jonah gets vomited onto the shore, covered in whatever a person is covered in after three days inside a fish, gasping and filthy and alive.

I love that the book refuses to make this dignified. Because grace is very often not dignified. It does not always arrive looking like an answered prayer with the light streaming in. Sometimes it arrives looking like getting spit up onto the sand with nothing left, having lost the argument you were having with God, alive against your own preference.

The turnaround in my own life did not look like a revival service either. It looked a lot more like this. Scraped together from the inside out. Delivered, yes, but delivered a mess, delivered without my consent, delivered onto dry land I did not choose, facing a direction I still did not want to go. That is what deliverance actually looked like. Not trumpets. Fish guts.

And notice where the fish leaves him. Dry land. The exact thing he confessed God had made, back on the boat, while running from it. God sets him down precisely where he belongs, facing precisely the direction he fled.

Tomorrow we finally get to Nineveh, and to the worst sermon ever preached. Come with this: is the rescue in your life arriving less gracefully than you hoped, and could that still be grace? Sometimes the messy landing is the whole miracle.

A Prayer for Today
God, thank you for the rescues that were not pretty. For getting me to dry land even when I arrived a wreck. Set me down facing the right way, and give me the grace to finally start walking. Amen.