3rd Sunday After
Epiphany - Year B January
25, 2015
Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Mark 1:14-20
There are many other stories
about people being called – Moses was called into the desert with the
Israelites to journey to the Promised Land.
Samuel was called as a young child, God even calling his name out
loud. Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah – most of
the Old Testament prophets include a little bit about their call in the beginning
of their prophetic utterances. In the
New Testament, we see Paul literally knocked off his horse and blinded by the
call of God.
What does it mean to be
called? What is required of the one who is called? Today I’d like for us to look at two other
stories about call – one from Old Testament wisdom literature and one from the
gospel of Mark.
Poor Jonah… his worst
nightmare has come true. He has gone to
give a word of gloom and doom to the people of Nineveh and they have believed
all that he has said. The people have
done exactly what Jesus also instructed the people to do… they repented and
believed in God. What a miracle for God…
so why is Jonah so mad? Let’s start at
the beginning.
In the first
chapter of the book of Jonah we see Jonah being called – called by God to
proclaim to the people of Ninevah the need for repentance. But for whatever reasons – fear stubbornness,
or lack of faith, Jonah ran away. And
when he ran away, he ran away big. “I’ll
go to the other side of the world – to Tarshish – to Spain. Yahweh will never find me there.” But just as his journey was beginning, a
violent storm shook the ship carrying the runaway cargo of God. And the further out to sea the boat went, the
more violent the storm became. Soon
sailors were throwing cargo overboard to try to save the ship. When that didn’t help, they started searching
for the one who had angered the gods so badly.
Jonah, asleep in the hold of the ship, was found and ultimately admitted
that he was probably the guilty party.
“Please throw me off the ship and you will be saved.” And as a last resort they obliged him. So there was Jonah, sinking fast in a restless,
turbulent sea.
But God believed that Jonah
was worth saving. He just needed to learn
an important lesson or two. So the story
tells us Jonah was swallowed by a very large fish, where he lived for three
days, talking to himself and praying to God.
And when God thought that Jonah could be reasoned with again, the fish
set Jonah free, depositing him up on a deserted beach.
Here’s where today’s reading
starts. “I got it,” Jonah told the Lord.
“You want me to go to Nineveh.
I’m on my way.” Three days later
Jonah began what he thought would be a 40-day campaign to the destruction of
Ninevah. On the first day, Jonah began
to preach. The crux of the sermon was
this… “Forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown by Yahweh, the God of the
Israelites.” No word of grace… no
promise for the future. No “what if”… no
“but on the other hand.” Jonah felt his
responsibility was to warn these worldly, evil people of their destruction at
the hand of God. But there were two
things Jonah didn’t count on. The people
believed… and God changed his mind.
Can you think of a moment
when God became very real to you? It may
have been when life was swirling around you.
Think hard… when did it dawn of you that God is real? Was it the way you experienced love, grace,
peace, repentance, salvation, sanctification… or maybe even disappointment or
anger? When was the time you could no
longer deny God’s existence and God’s overwhelming power over life and
death? For each of us, there is some
moment in time when, without a question or doubt, or maybe with lots of
questions and doubts, we believe. It often
happens when we least expect it. For
some, it is a blinding flash of truth – for others, it is the realization of a
truth that has been there all along.
The people of Ninevah
experienced knowledge of God in an unusual way, for as Jonah was preaching his
word of doom and destruction, they
heard God’s word of hope and possibility. Deep inside God’s message was a churning word
of hope. “Maybe it’s not so. Maybe it’s not too late. Why would God warn us if no possibility
existed for us to change the outcome?”
And in verses 8-9, the king speaks for and to the people of Ninevah,
saying “All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in
their hands. Who knows? God may relent
and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not
perish.”
The second call story of the
day comes from the gospel of Mark. It’s
such a bare-bones story. And we have
some many questions. What did their
families think? Did they know who Jesus
was? Did they have any idea what was in
store for them? And if they did, would
they do it again?
We don’t know the answers to
any of those questions, at least not from what the Bible tells us. We do know that this was a turning point – a
totally life-changing event. No one’s
life was ever the same after they followed Jesus.
There are very special “God
moments” in each of our lives. Sometimes
they are very subtle, and unless we tune into them we may not even recognize
them. Others are like huge flags waving
in our faces, saying “This is it. God is here.”
And while these experiences may take up very little chronological time,
they occupy a large part of our memory and faith experience. They engage us in such ways that they change
us and often steer us on paths we might not have chosen for ourselves. Or they confirm to us the reality that God is
present with us, watching and reacting and directing us, even at the times when
we think we are all alone.
The Greeks solved the problem
of talking about these two kinds of time by giving each a different word. The passage of time in seconds, minutes,
hours and days, is called kronos, giving us the word, “chronological.” In kronos time, things move in an
orderly fashion, dependable and never-changing.
It’s military time – where there are 24 hours, or 1440 minutes, or 86400
seconds in a day. It’s what keeps school
and work schedules running smoothly, and it’s what keeps us on track to be
productive members of society.
But there is another kind of
time called kairos. The word is used in the sense of “a time set
by God.” Kairos time set apart –
it is about grace, truth and decision.
It is a God-given moment and when it is used by the New Testament
writers it is always describing an opportunity for conversion and hope.
Jonah expected the people of
Nineveh to ignore his words, to go on about their evil little lives. Instead Jonah’s words changed their lives
forever. Instead of thinking, “Yeah –
whatever…” Jonah’s words of disaster were heard as an opportunity for
change. It’s actually pretty amazing…
without any hope of God’s repentance, without a clue of God’s turning around,
the people of Ninevah believed, and because of that belief, their lives would
never be the same.
For Simon and Andrew, James
and John, this kairos moment meant leaving behind the only work they had ever
known. It was the work that fed their
families. They contributed to the local economy, waking early, following the
patterns of fish, and selling at market. Being a fisherman was hard work, but offered them
a good life.
But Jesus asked them another path,
one of liberation. There was excitement in that – the possibility to break the
chains of social oppression, to form a different kind of community. And there
was a cost to it too. The price of admission was no less than their lives, or
at least their lives as they knew them, and their friends and families knew it.
When he called for these
fishermen to follow him, Jesus changed more than their lives as individuals; he
revealed that they were not locked into the identities the world had constructed
for them. Instead, in following him, they could change their perspective and
the way they lived. Their circumstances did not determine how God saw them or
in what God could accomplish through them.
And the same is true for us. In
giving up the preconceived notions about how we’re supposed to live and what we
are “required” to do, we surrender ourselves to God and Christ. This is scary,
because there is comfort and familiarity in who we think we are. But in
shedding the world’s labels, we also have the opportunity to release the fear
and shame that often accompany them.[i]
Hopefully, when we hear the
story of Jonah, or the stories of the disciples leaving their old ways of life
to follow Jesus, we realize that there are many opportunities to sense God’s
presence with us. These kairos moments can change our lives, shift our
perceptions of what is important and help us redirect our efforts and
experiences. And like the Ninevites and
the disciples, all we have to do is repent – turn to God, and to believe in the
good news of Christ. If we do this our
lives will never be the same.
I can’t tell you how to do
this – I can only know what that has been like for me. It has taken me 25 years and 11 moves to
understand that God has never called me to give up anything, but has always
gone ahead of me to prepare a place of worship and service and friendship
wherever we have been. And in the joy
and the sadness and the fear and the excitement of living a life of faith, I
know that God is with me. And I believe
that God has called me – to this place, on this day, to preach this word of
faith and hope.
This freedom is not doing as
you please. It's a journey on which we discover what it means to be loved by
God, and through this, become the sort of person who is drawn to the lives of
others – their joys, their pains, their tragedies, their hopes. In time we
realize that it’s about not placing ourselves at the center of the universe,
but in understanding that God has created us to worship him, and not the other
way around. It's a journey of identity
in which we move from understanding ourselves as living for our reasons, and
instead believing that God is giving us a heart with which to love God and the
world.
God said to Jonah, go – and
after some serious negotiation – Jonah went and proclaimed a word for God. And despite Jonah’s intentions for God, a
people were saved. Jesus said, “Follow me.” And even though they didn’t always get it
right, the disciples experienced God’s grace in a way that was totally
new. And a church was born. And the good news for today is this: we, too, are a part of the story… if we
believe.
Peace, Deb
