Here is a manuscript version of the sermon that Pastor Rick Stoner gave at Bethel about Jonah...
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Jonah: A Missionary without a Missionary’s Heart
Jonah (chap. 4)
Something About a Heart
Now I am no medical doctor but I’m fairly sure that if one did not have a heart then you could not live. I’m sure when you go to medical school that they tell you if your patient does not have a heart then you are in trouble. Maybe that’s why they take your pulse to make sure that you have a heart because after all if you don’t have a heart then they would be wasting their time. There’s really no cure for missing heart. So we know the heart is important and we have to keep it beating.
Now the same can be true for our mission of living out our faith in the world. If we do not have the heart, then we cannot fully live out the love for God in the world. The message will be shallow. We will only be a shell of what God has called us to. When I was a young lad in school there were times that the teacher would assign certain homework assignments. And, I would grudgingly do them but in the end I didn’t learn because I withheld myself from the learning; I didn’t put my heart in it.
If we are to be agents of transformation or reconciliation then our heart must be in it and when our heart is in it then we are transformed in the process and that brings us to Jonah. Now, we might think that the central plot line of Jonah is this tension between God and Nineveh, yet if we take a closer look we can see that the main tension, the main plot line, is the conflict between God and Jonah. And so we see two stories emerging: the story Jonah, which represents well Israel and later the church, and the story of God. This comes to a crescendo in the fourth chapter, so I would like us to jump into story for a moment and look at this drama between God and Jonah
So we see Jonah is a missionary without a missionary’s heart. Sure Jonah has crossed the physical frontiers but inside he is stuck. Let’s break that down.
Jonah Yells at God (4:1-4)
The first section is verses 1-4. It is clear from the text that Jonah is not happy with the situation at hand. God has just spared Nineveh from destruction and Jonah is greatly displeased or disgusted with the situation. The text says that he prays to God, and I would like to think this is one of those yelling type prayers (Oh, Lord!…). Then Jonah proceeds to lay out for us the reason that he fled to Tarshish: he knew who God was/is. He knew God is gracious, compassionate, sow to anger, abounding in love, and relents to send calamity. And now because God is who God is, he wants to die (a bit dramatic). God then turns it back on Jonah with God’s question to help Jonah hear himself.
But this prayer sets up for us this dual narrative that is happening. First we see the narrative of Jonah, where God is our God, or said a different way God is a bounded God: bound within our group for our group. We see this when Jonah lists off the qualities of God he quotes Ex. 34:6, where God is saying these words to Moses. So the people know God’s character but that character is for them. And it is obvious from Jonah’s reaction that is how he understood it. Yet before we go off on Jonah we must look long and hard in the mirror because if we are honest with ourselves this is the way the church has understood God’s grace as well. Just look at our language for a moment. We like to us a lot of “us” and “them” language (the Godly and Godless). Yet, we even see Peter challenged on this very insider/outsider issue in Acts 10. And so, Jonah is being challenged to move from cold nationalistic God to a big understanding of God.
Yet, Jonah’s prayer also reveals another troubling aspect of insider or bounded thinking. It shows us that it is far easier to assume that God is with us and not them. Where does this thinking get us? Well let’s look at Jonah’s train of thought. God is with Israel and not with the evil, vile, wicked Assyrians so naturally God needs to destroy them. So let’s spin that thinking forward to, oh say 313AD, now God is for a certain state and now that state has political ambitions and now what happens when we follow that trail. We get many stories of God being with us and not them and us destroying them.
But God’s narrative is characterized by freedom and hope. No matter how much Jonah tries to subvert or undercut God’s plans, God will not be bound up. No, God is seeking to bring salvation, even to Jonah.
The Object Lesson of the Plant (4:5-11)
God seeing that Jonah is not getting it decided to take a new approach. Now God is a savvy teacher and knows that words are going to get the point across because after all Jonah already knows all the right words. So, he provides Jonah with an object lesson. There Jonah sits outside of the city in his makeshift shelter stewing is his melancholy soup of bitterness and contempt, when low and behold a vine or bush grows up over him. Jonah is overjoyed; he is after all a guy of extreme emotions. And then as providence would have it a worm, or some say weevil, but we’ll just allow that to be a mystery, comes and chews the plant and it dies. Then God provides a scorching or sultry east wind. And Jonah, remember mister emotions, wants to die. God asks him if he has a right to be mad about the plant and Jonah says yes. And that is where the lesson comes into focus. God is showing Jonah that the same concern he had for the plant, which he had no control over, is the same that God has for the great city of Nineveh. Where Jonah is struggling to get the picture God provides a concrete example for him to catch on to: Jonah has compassion so why can’t God. Just like Jonah did not want the plant to die, so God does not want the people to die. In this way God is not just playing a cruel trick on Jonah he is trying to open his eyes to his own hypocrisy and arrogance. He is trying to save Jonah. The irony being that the pagans can see God’s grace but the man of God, the missionary, the prophet cannot.
In this object lesson it becomes clear that God is seeking Jonah’s redemption. As David Bosch points out, “The emphasis of the Jonah story is a call for Jonah—Israel and the church—to allow himself to be converted to a compassion comparable to that of God.” The object lesson pushes us to understand that the importance or significance of Jonah does not lie in a hyper-emotional prophet going crossing physical frontiers but it pushes to see if Jonah will get the picture that God’s grace and compassion knows no boundaries. Jonah could not keep the plant for himself the same way that God’s grace is not just for the people Jonah thinks should be “saved.” So we can see in the end in the object lesson of the plant God is seeking Jonah’s repentance and transformation: a new way or relating to enemies (compassion) and a new understanding of his purpose (to bring hope to the nations). So the object lesson of the plant illuminates the eyes of our hearts to see past the lifeless walls of stale insider outsider divide to a kingdom of God where God is a God of compassion, steadfast love and peace.
Will Jonah Be Saved?
The climax of the book is the question that ends it. It is the place where we face the heart of the matter. It is at this point that we have to ask ourselves, “Will Jonah be saved?” God is so desperately seeking Jonah. He saves Jonah from death and heat and yet Jonah can’t see what God is doing or fully understand who God is. For Jonah, God is a petty nationalistic God who stamps out Jonah’s enemies. For Jonah, mercy belong to those on the inside of the community not those on the outside. Yet, God will not leave Jonah to wallow in the belly of the fish forever. God will not allow Jonah to sit in his hand crafted cocoon of insider comfort. No, God puts the question to Jonah, “Should God not show mercy?” Should God not show mercy to those God cares about even when they don’t meet our standards? Should God not care about the fate of those we deem to enemies, or foreigners or different?
To answer the question we must journey deep inside ourselves. Perhaps we need to be swallowed by our own fish and sit with the Jonah in us all. You see God’s call to mission—God’s call to Jonah—is a call where both the messenger and recipients receive salvation, that is healing. And so our choice becomes the same as Jonah’s. We can run in frustration because we know God’s true character. We can sit in frustration angry in the face of God’s mercy. Yet if we choose either of those options, we might want to be prepared to deal with the seaweed wrapped around us as we sink in our own raging seas of bitterness, or we might want some sunscreen as the hot wind and sun scorch us as the truth of who God is burns away at our nice boundaries for God’s love.
If we are to be saved then we must come to terms with the fact that deep in the belly of each of us lurks a “Jonah,” who whispers a poisonous message of smug prejudice, who seeking to clutch tightly to empty lifeless traditionalism, and who shuts out the “other” through exclusive community. Yes, if we are to be saved then we must grasp the message of the book of Jonah, the message of God’s final question, and eliminate the petty Jonah that would sit and stew in the face of God’s mercy. So, as the great fish or whale coughed up Jonah on the beach, so must we cough up from within us the Jonah of smug prejudice; staleness, stagnate traditionalism; and stubborn exclusivity. So, will we be saved? What do think?
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