Jonah 1:1-10; Matthew 28:16-20
A lot of people have asked what the Kaylors do on vacation. The answer is, not much. Some people go to exotic locales. We usually go to Pittsburgh. The upside of that, however, is that you do have a lot of time to read on the long flight and this year it was particularly long because, to get to Pittsburgh from Denver I had a layover in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (because, you know, that’s the quickest way to get to Pittsburgh). So, I stocked up on some books for the flight and one in particular intrigued me: The Church in Exile: Living in Hope After Christendom. It’s by a Canadian seminary prof named Lee Beach.
I picked up this book because I thought the title was appropriate for the times we live in. It’s no secret that our culture has gone through a sea change in the few decades and the influence of the church on the surrounding culture has retreated significantly. Most scholars are announcing the end of Christendom in the West—that period of history beginning in about the fourth century and lasting up until the late twentieth century.
Some of us still remember the tail end of Christendom—a lot of us remember when the church was the center of community life; when stores were closed on Sundays and no one dreamed of having soccer practice on Sunday morning (actually, no one dreamed about soccer at all back then). We remember when TV tended to reflect Judeo-Christian morals and values and when sex was something whispered about in bedrooms and paraded before our faces every day. We wonder how we got here, and seemingly so quickly. Historians debate the causes of what we now call “postmodernism” and some insist that the church itself contributed to its own demise. In another fascinating book, The Unintended Reformation, historian Brad Gregory suggests that the change actually started to happen during the Reformation in the 16th century, when the church broke into factions over the interpretation of Scripture—something not possible during the Catholic era—which made the Enlightenment possible, which in turn exchanged faith and community for science and reason and an emphasis on human progress. Add on the post-war cultural shifts of the 1960s, including the sexual revolution, increased wealth and leisure time, and the rise of mass media and it’s no wonder that things have changed. The culture no longer recognizes Christ and him crucified, only humanity and it improved (sort of).
Some wish that we could go back to those days of Christendom, but the reality is that they are gone. Whereas the Christian narrative used to be the overriding one in the West, Lee Beach says now we have a culture that, at its heart, “rejects any universal narrative or collective ethic that might offer a sense of common foundation to its inhabitants, as the Christian story once did for North America and large parts of Europe.” We see the results in declining churches and the marginalization of religious people in the public eye.
So the question is, given this emerging reality, what is the church of Jesus Christ to do? How do you live in what is becoming, for many people, a foreign and maybe even hostile culture to people of faith? Well, it’s important to remember that we aren’t the first people to ask those sorts of questions. In fact, a lot of the Bible was written to address that very topic in response to what was then the greatest shift in the history of the people of God—the exile.
In the 8th and 6th centuries BC, foreign invaders took over the dual kingdoms of Israel and Judah respectively and carted off many of the people into slavery and exile in the lands of the conquerors—the Assyrians and then the Babylonians. Suddenly, these people of God were thrust into a culture that was foreign, hostile, and with an uncertain future. How the people of God live and, indeed, thrive in such a culture is the subject of much of the Old Testament literature. It’s an important question for us as well as we move from the familiarity of Christendom to our own version of exile.
One of the most interesting pieces of that literature is the book of Jonah, which is unique in the Bible. It lands in the order of the Minor Prophets and yet it’s not simply a list of prophetic oracles like the others. Instead, it’s a story about one man and his response to God in the midst of a foreign culture. Scholars debate the nature of Jonah’s story: is it history? allegory? satire? But one thing is clear, it’s a story directed at the people of God. Beach calls it a “diasporic advice tale”—advice to people in exile on how to and how not to be God’s people in a foreign land. Jonah has four chapters and I would argue that Jonah’s story offers four different responses that Israel could take, and that we can take, when in exile. We’re going to look at each of these four responses in this series, and since I love alliteration, I characterize them as the four R’s of living in exile:
We can Run Away, we can Repent, we can Reengage the Mission, and/or we can Rely on grace.
So, let’s begin with the most tempting option first, which is what Jonah adopts when faced with the call of God. The story begins with Jonah son of Ammitai, which may refer to a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel named Jonah in 2 Kings 14:25 who predicts the prosperity of the kingdom under Jeroboam the 2nd. That prosperity would be short-lived, however, because the Assyrians would invade just a few decades later in 722BC and essentially wipe the northern kingdom of Israel off the map.
Assyria was the dominant empire of that period and their aggression and methods make the modern day ISIS insurgents look like a bunch of Cub Scouts. The annals of the Assyrian kings are all about conquest—the piling up of the heads of their enemies, skinning people alive and using their skins to cover their monuments. Assyria was a bitter, hated enemy to whom smaller nations owed tribute. Israel was one of those nations.
And yet, the word of the Lord came to Jonah, telling him to go to Assyria, to its capital city of Nineveh, “and cry out against it, for their evil has come to my attention.” Now, we can’t blame Jonah for being terrified at this prospect. It’s like if God came to you one night and said, “I need you to pack up and head to Syria tomorrow to tell ISIS I’m not happy with them.” You’d be like, “Can’t I just send them an email? Can’t I just craft a killer Facebook post or put up a meme?” After all, this is the way that many Christians in our world today deal with the post-Christendom culture. We rail away at it from a distance.
But God is sending Jonah into the middle of it and Jonah’s response is to run. Now here’s the interesting twist to the story, which is revealed in more detail later. We might think Jonah is running because he’s afraid of what the Assyrians might do to him, that his mission will be a disastrous failure and his head put in one of those piles. But what we come to realize, however, is that Jonah’s fear is not so much about his potential failure but about his potential success. He’s afraid that his message of warning might actually be heeded, that Nineveh might actually repent and be spared. It is, after all, a lot easier to preach condemnation to one’s enemies than it is to preach grace.
So, Jonah son of Ammitai, whose name means, in Hebrew, “Dove, son of Faithfulness” actually doesn’t soar in peace and faithfulness to Nineveh but goes down in spite—he goes down to Joppa, where he goes down into the hold of a ship and goes the opposite direction of God’s command. Take a look at the map—he books a passage for Tarshish, which a lot of scholars think could be the modern-day island of Sardinia (which is now a resort place). But notice what he is fleeing from—not the Assyrians. He is “fleeing from the Lord.” He is fleeing from his call to ministry.
The temptation of Jonah to flee was a temptation for the first people who read the scroll of Jonah as well. It was tempting for people in exile to retreat from the surrounding culture, to simply condemn and complain about it, and stick to being with their own people. It’s the same temptation we face today—the temptation to retreat and set up our own little Christian island with our own culture, our own music, our own schools, our own way of living. Like Jonah, we pray for God’s condemnation of a culture that has become a cesspool of evil and we await God’s wrath upon it. We figure, like Jonah, that God’s presence has been withdrawn from the rest of the world and that we’re the last ones left. Plenty of Christian movements have taken this tack of retreat from the world in times like ours, setting up their own version of the island of Tarshish—a utopian place where we don’t have to deal with that culture and those people.
But here’s the thing: those communities never really work. When I was in Kentucky there was an old Shaker village nearby. The Shakers were a sect that wanted nothing to do with the world, including the worldly pleasures of sex even within marriage. The result? No more Shakers. Great furniture, but no more Shakers!
Less radical than the Shakers but no less Tarshish bound are those who are constantly on the look for a better church (and this includes pastors as well as parishioners). Surely there has to be a place where we don’t have to deal with people and all their sin and “stuff.” Surely there’s a place where we can simply be happy and content with a private spirituality that is all about me and God.
Of course, there is the opposite tactic, which is to run with the culture and become more like it in the name of “relevance.” Some Israelites took that approach, trying to fit in by adopting the customs of the culture around them, as do a lot of Christians today. Best not to rock the boat, go along to get along, that sort of thing. We can have a little bit of Tarshish right where we are, comfortable and content to let the cultural wind blow us where it may.
But Tarshish is actually a myth. Eugene Peterson, in his wonderful book Under the Unpredictable Plant puts it like this: “We respond to the divine initiative, but we humbly request to choose the destination. We are going to be [disciples], but not in Nineveh for heaven’s sake. Let’s try Tarshish. In Tarshish we can have a religious career without having to deal with God.”
The “divine initiative” is God’s redemptive plan for the world—a plan that began with Israel and continues with the church—a plan to take the redemptive love of God into the world and not retreat from it. The Gospel of Matthew ends with a reiteration of that divine initiative. Jesus tells his disciples to “Go and make disciples of all nations (note all nations, including the ones who are your enemies), baptizing and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always until the end of the age.”
Will Willimon once speculated as to whether that last statement was a promise or a threat. “I will be with you always.” You can’t run from this mission. God is putting the world right and he has set us right so that we might be his right-putting people. Jonah is to go and be God’s agent to set things right in Nineveh. Israel was to be God’s family who would be a light to the world, revealing God’s plan to set things right. Jesus was the embodiment of Israel who came to fulfill God’s redemptive plan in his own life, death, and resurrection, and the church is still called to go into a a world and a culture that has drifted far from God and announce the good news that God is offering his redemptive love and grace to any who will receive it. Methodists, above all people, should get this because we believe in God’s prevenient grace—it’s not just a few of the “elect” that God is seeking out, it’s everyone—an offer of grace and salvation to Ninevites of all stripes. And if we are really God’s people, then we can never flee from this call.
Jonah tried, got on a ship, got in a divinely inspired storm, and got thrown overboard into the water—that’s how the rest of chapter 1 plays out. He can’t flee from God, can’t flee from the mission. He gets dumped in the water and, from there, he gets on with heeding God’s call. Come to think of it, isn’t that what being dumped in the water of baptism does for us as well? Jonah will undergo what looks like certain death, he will be buried in the belly of a great fish, and then be spit out on the shore to engage the mission God called him to. Sounds a lot like the journey of a Christian! We are baptized, we are put into the water, we die with Christ and are buried with him under the waves, and then we are commissioned for the mission he has for us—a mission that will take us to the Ninevehs of the world. Baptism is the sign that we can never flee from the presence of the Lord—we can only join him where he is at work. That’s the call.
Jonah knew how much grace God was capable of offering, even to his bitter enemy. We know how much grace God is capable of because we have witnessed a Savior dying on a cross at the hands of his enemies but, even more importantly, dying for them. And because we know how much grace God is capable of, we must not run away from offering it to others, even those in Nineveh. You’ve been thrown in the water for a reason!
As you look at the world today, who or what is your Nineveh? Maybe it’s a person who is your enemy, maybe it’s a difficult situation, maybe it’s a general aversion to what our culture has become. God knows how much brokenness there is out there, but God also reminds us how much grace he has to offer. Like Jonah, you may just be the means by which he offers that grace. God is already at work in that person, in that situation. All you need to do is go.
