For the next two weeks, I’m returning to one of my favorite sermon series (duologies?) exploring the book of Jonah. This sermon is an adaptation of my sermon for St. Peter on January 17, 2021.
My sermon on this first chapter of Jonah’s story explores themes of sin, forgiveness, and faith in Jonah 1. The other readings for this Sunday are Acts 2:14a,36-41; Psalm 16; and Matthew 28:16-20.
Here’s the livestream from Living Hope and the sermon podcast audio:
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Grace to you and peace in the name of our risen Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen
How many people do you think are named in the Bible? Any guesses? (Higher…lower…)
There are 1,941 different people! I found a page this week listing every single person in the Bible, along with the verses where they’re mentioned and a brief description, all the way from Aaron to Zurishaddai. It’s impressive.
Some of those names are people we know pretty much nothing about—they just show up in genealogies—but there are still hundreds of Biblical characters worth knowing and talking about, and we just don’t have time to get to all of them on Sunday mornings.
Usually we spend the weeks after Easter looking at stories of the early church (like the road to Emmaus), and we’ll come back to those in May, but for now, we’re going to jump back to a small book in the Old Testament and explore a famous story about a less-familiar character, a reluctant prophet who encounters an exceedingly large fish.
Just from that description, you probably know who I’m talking about: A guy by the name of Jonah. Maybe you know Jonah’s story from Sunday School or a VBS lesson—I think it’s in every children’s Bible ever written.
Jonah’s a popular story, but not one we focus on in worship other than maybe two readings over the three-year lectionary cycle.
So, this week we’re going to go through chapter one, next Sunday we’ll cover the other three chapters, and that’s the whole book. And I think it’s a pretty great story, not just because I have a kid named Jonah, but I think this book’s message is still important for us today.
Here’s the first chapter of the book of Jonah:
Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.”
So, the first thing we hear about Jonah is God giving him a job. This is a call story. Jonah’s mission is to be a prophet, someone who proclaims a message from God.
The message God gives him is addressed to the city of Nineveh, which is the capital of the Assyrian empire, and it’s a message of judgment. It’s doom and gloom, fire-and-brimstone. Jonah is supposed to travel to Nineveh, and let them know God’s seen their wicked sin, and God’s going to punish them.
This is already an unsettling story, because we modern Christians don’t really like to talk about sin or punishment. We’re about grace, not condemnation, right? One of the big Christian radio networks has the slogan that they’re “positive and encouraging.” Sin is an ugly word. It’s not positive.
Talking about sin puts a value judgement on things, declaring a difference between right and wrong, and that’s uncomfortable, right?
It’s easy to misuse the idea of sin, to talk about the sins of others as if they’re somehow worse than our own, or to go too far talking about our own sins as if they are all that defines us.
In our Lutheran tradition, we’re not afraid of sin in the abstract. We started worship today by confessing that we’ve all sinned. But we’re still reluctant to talk about particular sins, at least I am. It ought to be uncomfortable to say “we all have sinned and need forgiveness” but it’s a lot easier than saying “I, personally, have sinned by doing this or that. This action I did, this attitude I have, this habit I’m attached to is wrong, and I need to stop it and ask God for forgiveness.” Personal confession is hard!
And the idea of telling someone else they are sinning…well, it’s one thing to tell someone on the internet that they’re wrong—many people seem perfectly comfortable doing that—but it’s another thing to go personally and put yourself at risk by telling someone or some group that they’re acting wickedly and need to repent.
Peter does it in his sermon in Acts 2, but for most of us, it’s a tough balance to call out sin in a loving way, for the benefit of the sinner, rather than just complain or condemn. We see how easily that can go wrong, and we don’t want to be judgmental, or hypocritical.
Jonah has some concerns too. Verse 3:
But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.
Chapter 1 doesn’t tell us Jonah’s exact motivation for ignoring his mission and running away to Tarshish, but it’s not hard to imagine. You can understand why Jonah doesn’t want this call, right?
Calling people to repent of their sin is an unpleasant task to start with, but what if they don’t do it? What if they laugh at me?
I want people to like me; what if they think I’m saying I’m better than them, or they start telling me all my sins? And in Jonah’s case, there’s physical danger too! He was going against people with power, in a city not known for its hospitality to outsiders. Ninevah is the capital of the Assyrian empire, the enemy of Israel.
If I suddenly started feeling that God was telling me to travel to North Korea and call them to repent, I think I’d be pretty reluctant to go too. Much safer to go the other way.
In fact, if you ever think you’re feeling God calling you to put yourself or others in danger, I hope you’ll hesitate too. There can be a lot of voices out there that sound like God that aren’t God. There’s a great verse in 1 John 4 that tells us as Christians, we need to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God” to make sure that the call you’re feeling lines up with Scripture, to discern and pray with other believers.
Even if you think you feel God calling you to point out the sin of someone you know, be cautious. There’s a reason Jesus tells us to notice the log in our own eye before trying to take a speck out of our neighbor’s eye.
But sometimes, sin does need to be called out. In fact, as I think about God’s message of judgment to Ninevah for its sins, I wonder what God’s message of judgment to our own nation would be, what sins God is calling you and me to repent of?
I want to be careful in my wording here, because I too don’t like offending people (I have some sympathy for Jonah) but there’s plenty of sin in our own nation to choose from. Exploitation of the poor, white supremacy, destruction of God’s good creation, valuing power or stuff more than people, corruption, using our power to bully others, devaluing human life, racist structures, mass incarceration, there’s plenty we could come up with.
And you and I have plenty of more individual sins to repent of as well, the times we act out of selfishness, greed, and fear, the times we fail to trust God, when we look away from our neighbor’s needs, when we fail to seek justice. Unfaithfulness in relationships, laziness, hoarding our resources, lying, gossiping, and assuming the worst of others, abandoning and ignoring people in need, fleeing from God’s call.
You can ask the Holy Spirit to send you a prophet to show you what you need to repent of. That’s between you and God.
If those lists are a little uncomfortable, if it’s easier to do a vague corporate confession together than to start naming particular sins, then you understand a little of how Jonah felt.
So he gets on a ship and heads in the opposite direction. He’s running away from God’s call.
But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up. Then the sailors were afraid, and each cried to his god. They threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten it for them.
Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. The captain came and said to him, “What are you doing sound asleep? Get up; call on your god! Perhaps the god will spare us a thought so that we do not perish.”
Two things to notice: First, these sailors are religious people, but they’re not followers of Yahweh, the one true God.
Like so many people though, they’re superstitious, and when they’re in trouble, they’ll pray to anyone who might be able to help. It’s sort of a “no atheists in foxholes” kind of thing.
Second, people often blame God for things like floods and hurricanes and earthquakes, and after a disaster, you can usually find articles wondering if God is punishing someone.
Usually, I believe the answer is no. If your basement flooded this week, I don’t think that’s a punishment from God; sometimes bad things just happen. Looking for meaning in every weather pattern is a dangerous path to go down.
That said, in this story, the superstitious sailors are right. This storm does have a particular purpose, although I don’t know how much comfort that’d be to the people whose deliveries were tossed overboard!
The sailors said to one another, “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. Then they said to him, “Tell us why this calamity has come upon us.What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?”
“I am a Hebrew,” he replied. “I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”
Jonah lacks the faith to follow God, but he is a believer. He’s a lousy prophet, but he knows God is the one who made the sea and the dry land, which makes his whole attempt to run away seem pretty foolish.
He knows he’s in the wrong here. Imagine how much guilt he must be feeling. He’s not courageous enough to come forward on his own, but when they ask him directly, he confesses.
Then the men were even more afraid and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them so.
Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea was growing more and more tempestuous. He said to them, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you.”
Is it a heroic sacrifice if you don’t have any other options? I’m not sure. But at least Jonah seems to be learning from his mistakes. He’s ready to stop running from God – in fact, he seems to be ready to meet God!
Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more stormy against them.
Then they cried out to the Lord, “Please, O Lord, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.”
You’ve got to love these sailors, right? These guys are doing their best in a terrible situation. They’ve done nothing wrong, and again, they’re not followers of God, but they know it’s not a great moral decision to throw their passenger overboard.
So they pray to the Lord—whom they’re only just starting to believe in—and they ask for forgiveness. Not our fault, God!
Not that it does Jonah much good, but his mission of calling people to repent is actually starting to bear fruit! These sailors, the foreign heathens in this story, are really more faithful than Jonah!
So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.
But the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
So, that’s the end of chapter one, and that’s where we’ll leave Jonah’s story for today.
Despite Jonah’s disobedience, despite his lack of faith and his general incompetence as a prophet, God’s not done with him. God hasn’t given up on him, which is good news for him and for us.
If you want to read ahead, we’re going to cover the entire rest of the book next week, and really, chapter one and the big fish is just the introduction—we’ll get to the point of the story in chapters 3 and 4 next week.