Gone Fishing: The Belly of a Whale
Jonah 1:1-6,
11-17
August 17,
2014
Mark S.
Bollwinkel
Its summertime and we hang out the
“Gone Fishing” sign to take a vacation or even a weekend away. It’s a time to renewal our body, mind and
spirit. We are take a journey through a
number of the biblical stories involving fish and fishing. Today we are looking at a favorite and often
misunderstood sage of Jonah and the whale.
Do you know the story of Jonah?
Most of us know about the “great
fish” which we usually identify as a “whale” but there is much more to the
whole story.
God calls Jonah as a prophet to
Nineveh to preach repentance and forgiveness.
Nineveh was the capital of the
Assyrian Empire, located today near the city of Mosul in Northern Iraq. It was a great and wicked city known for its
immorality and violence.
During the 8th century BCE
the Assyrian Empire would control most of the known world, including
Israel. They were brutal
oppressors. Their General Sennacrib
would actually destroy the Northern Kingdom of Israel and sack its capital
Samaria in 722 BCE.
When Jonah gets the call to prophecy
he runs away in the opposite direction from Nineveh.
It may have been the fear of the
task at hand.
It may have been his hatred of the
Assyrians. They were Gentiles, not Hebrews. They had terrorized his nation. Jonah didn’t want them to repent. He wanted God to destroy them.
So he ran.
So abhorrent was this divine call to
Jonah that he would have preferred to die than go to Nineveh. When a storm threatened to sink the ship on
which he was escaping, Jonah tells the sailors to throw him overboard. After some discussion and the throwing of
dice, they do it out of fear for their lives.
It is then that the “great fish”
comes along and swallows Jonah.
God saved the reluctant prophet’s
life in the belly of a whale where he stays for three days. There Jonah cries out in agony and wonders at
the hand of a God who saves him from death.
The fish spews Jonah out onto the
land and God calls him a second time to go to Nineveh. He goes this time and delivers the Lord’s
message, “Nineveh you’ve got 40 days to repent!”
To Jonah’s anger and amazement the
Ninevehians do just that. Even the
animals confess their sin and ask God’s forgiveness.
Now Jonah is really ticked off!
He wanted this barbarian, sinful
city destroyed.
They were Gentiles after all,
unclean and profane.
In utter frustration Jonah stomps
off into the desert to die in the sun.
He knows what God is like, “gracious…and merciful, slow to anger, and
abounding in steadfast love…ready to repent from punishment” (4:2). Revenge and violence have no satisfaction
for a God like this and Jonah would just rather die.
But then God causes a bush to grow
that gives the prophet shade.
God will not let him go. Neither will God change from the course of
love.
The story tells us about ourselves
in two important ways. Like Jonah, we
want God on our own terms and we want God to leave us alone.
Remember the story about the
faithful man caught in the flood?
The flood waters are rising and a
Sheriff’s jeep comes out to rescue him.
But the faithful man says, “No need to rescue me, God will save me!”
The waters continue to rise past the
door of his house and up to the roof.
The Red Cross sends out a motor boat to rescue the faithful man, but
again he says, “No need to rescue me, God will save me!”
Finally, with the faithful man
standing on the chimney of his submerged home, as the flood water lap against
his ankles, the National Guard sends out a helicopter to rescue him, but again
he refuses the help saying, “No need to rescue me, God will save me!”
The man drowns. Instantly he is transported to heaven where
in meeting St. Peter he asks to lodge a complaint.
“I was faithful all my life. I refused all help believing that God would
save me. Why did the Almighty let me
down?!”
Just then a divine voice broke forth
and answered, “I sent a jeep, a motorboat and a helicopter, what more did you
want me to do?!”
We want God on our own terms.
We jump from church to church,
denomination to denomination, running to find the worship style, the theology
or the preacher that will agree with our tastes. But the same God will find you no matter what
the religion.
We say we want our church to grow…to
offer Christ to our community. But for
most that means having people come here who are just like us, not folks with
new ideas or different colors or languages.
We equate Christianity with the
“American Way of Life”. But God is no
Republican or Democrat, no capitalist or liberal.
When we expect God to fit into our
prejudices and preferences we are exactly like Jonah who ran from God’s call
because Jonah would have no part of a loving and gracious God’s attempt to save
a foreign, sinful people.
And we want God to leave us alone.
Karl Barth, the great New Testament
scholar once warned us that “the church is not only the place where man meets
God; it is often also the place where man makes his last stand against God”.
We want church to make us
comfortable.
Let’s be honest, we come here on
Sunday mornings for succor not repentance; to learn how to cope with life not
to change it.
Its OK for a preacher to give you
support as you struggle with your spouse’s drinking problem but God forbid if
he suggests that you are part of the problem.
It’s expected that good Christians will rally around because of the
neglect you take at home but God forbid if they suggest that nothing will
change until you do.
We expect the church to massage the
past and manipulate our sentiments. But it’s
not OK in church to honestly suggest that we change.
Jonah rushes to the cargo hold of a
ship heading West to hide from the God that calls him East.
How many of us come to church on a
Sunday hoping that no one will notice how much we hurt…or doubt? How many of us come to church to hide?
Sometimes like Jonah we want God
just to leave us alone.
The story of Jonah also tells us two
important things about God.
God refuses to let us go and God
refuses to be anything less than God.
I went through a terrible crisis
during my second year of seminary. I
graduated “Outstanding Student” of my University. In graduate school the professors were
brilliant. The other students were
brilliant. Taking a full load, learning
another language, taking comp exams, I was doing everything I could to keep my
head above water.
I was in my early twenties. Bonnie and I were newly married. We worked five jobs between us and were on
food stamps to make ends meet.
There came a period of about 6
months of real depression. I began to
have panic attacks. I began to have
terrible claustrophobia, couldn’t even sit in a crowded classroom or travel in
an airplane. I thought I was losing my
mind, maybe I was.
By the grace of God and the
insistence of Bonnie I started to see a therapist. In spite of my dreams of being a preacher I
was afraid I couldn’t cut it in seminary and the stress was overwhelming
me. One day sharing my fears, the
counselor David broke into my fog and confronted me saying, “Bollwinkel, do you
have something to say with your life or not?!” to which I responded, “Well,
yes, I think so”. “Then say it and let
God do the rest!”
It was a real turning point for
me. Graduate School never became easy
but I dropped the expectation that I had to do it perfectly. I gave up the notion that it was all up to
me alone, that I had to be all things to all people in the process. Within a few months the panic attacks and
claustrophobia stopped and I have never been plagued by then again. Thanks be to God.
I am telling you, God
refuses to let you go.
The Wesleyan doctrine of “prevenient
grace” describes the action God takes to bring us into relationship even before
we decide to believe. Every prayer your
mother taught you, every lesson of your Sunday school teacher shared, every act
of loving kindness from a stranger or a friend, was an agent of God’s
prevenient grace.
Since the day you were born, God has
sought to claim your life and bring you home.
And God is working on you now, whether you know it or not. God refuses to let you go.
In fact, God refuses to be anything
less than God.
Jonah resisted God’s call because he
knew God so well. The Ninevites deserved
wrath and judgment. These pagan
terrorists deserved God’s punishment.
Jonah wasn’t afraid to tell them that.
He was afraid that God would give those Gentiles a second chance and
change his mind.
“I knew that thou art a gracious God
and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, ready to repent of
punishment”.
The prophet wants God to sanctify
Jonah’s prejudice and hatred, not change it, transform it, not use it in God
unceasing plan of salvation for all.
We are like Jonah when we come to a place
of worship like this, hoping that God won’t notice or care about our sin.
God won’t bless what we do to hurt
ourselves and each other.
Sorry.
The God of Jonah doesn’t work that
way.
Our God moves us. Disturbs us.
Disrupts the routine.
Our God will not change from the
course of love.
Just before heavyweight champion Joe
Louis was going into the ring with Billy Conn in 1941, reporters asked the Champion,
“Are you worried about this fight?
Aren’t you worried that he will dance around you?” Joe thought for a moment and then said,
“Well, he can run but he can’t hide.”
Neither can we.
The story of Jonah is our story in
many ways.
We, like Jonah, want God on our own
terms.
Sometimes all we want is for God to
leave us alone.
But God refuses to let us go.
God is like that. God won’t be anything less.
Amen.
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