Sermons

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Prayers from the Belly
May 21, 2000
First of two sermons on Jonah
Pastor Dan Baumgartner

Jonah 1 & 2 

In the next two weeks, we’re going to be looking at one of the favorite stories from all of the Old Testament…from all of the Bible, really. It’s the story of Jonah. Jonah and the whale. Jonah and the big fish. It’s a funny story, a sometimes silly story, a foolish story. But it’s a story that has definitely captured the imagination of the church down through the ages. It’s depicted in many of the huge stained glass windows in the cathedrals of Europe. I read about one cathedral in Poland, in fact, where the pulpit was actually a carved rendition of the jaws of the great fish…and the pastor stood in those jaws with the teeth just above his head…to preach!

This story of Jonah comes up whenever people discuss how we are to read scripture. After all, here is a story where a man is actually swallowed by a fish, or a whale, or a sea monster. Now, some people have argued vigorously that this is an actual, historical factual story. And they’ve gone to great pains to prove it. They’ve measured, and said that if a fish were a certain size, then the stomach would be this size, and therefore would hold enough air to allow a person to stay alive. Others say: Hogwash! This couldn’t happen. These people also have measured, and decided that because of the acid content of any fish’s stomach, no one could stay alive. Others say we must read this story as an allegory, where every detail is intended to teach us something. Still others say that this is a parable, with just one or two main points for us to learn. You can see it gets rather complicated and convoluted. And to be honest, I’m not even too interested this morning that we deal with these. I have another suggestion. I’m going to suggest that we read this as a story…a story which God wants to use today to teach us some truths about Him, and about us. 

This is a story rich with things to learn. It reminds me of a cut diamond, with all of the different faces and edges and bevels. Every time you turn it even a little, the light hits it differently, and a different color bounces off of it. This story changes each time we turn it.

Jonah 1:1-3: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord.”

Jonah isn’t off to a very good start, is he? Here he is a prophet speaking for God, called to be a missionary…but we won’t learn much from Jonah’s successes. Only from his failures. God tells him to do something…and he runs away instead. Now, my tendency is to shake my finger and say “tsk, tsk.” How could he? How could he run away from God? But before we shake our fingers too much, we need to understand a few things about Jonah’s situation.

1. Jonah was being called to go a long, long way from home. Jonah was somewhere in the vicinity of Jerusalem, and Ninevah was all the way up in Assyria, present day Iraq on the Tigris River. 
2. Ninevah was well known as a nasty place. It was the capital city of Assyria, and perhaps a province as well. The Old Testament speaks several times of the hardness of Ninevah, of Assyria. Archaeologists have unearthed plaques in other places in the Middle East which talk about how hard and cruel of a city Ninevah was.
3. Most importantly, Ninevah was the headquarters of Jonah (and Israel’s) arch enemy. As best we can tell, this story takes place around the middle of the 8th century BC…somewhere around 750 BC. In the century previous to this, Assyria two times invaded Israel, killing and attacking. And just after this story, in 722 BC, Assyria would sweep down and take all of Northern Israel, the 10 Northern tribes. They are definitely an enemy.

If Jonah obeys God, and goes to Ninevah, and preaches, and the Assyrians repent and God spares them…Jonah will have, in essence, aided his most hated enemy. And so I wonder if Jonah doesn’t get an unfair bad reputation. He definitely has one which has lasted through the ages. In fact, in modern psychology there is even a term called the “Jonah Complex,” or the “Jonah Syndrome.” Both Jung and Maslow talk about it. It is described as “a pathological wish to regress to a womb-like state (the fish).” Someone like me might say it like this: “a resistance to growth, authenticity and change.”

All I’m saying is that Jonah might be getting a bad rap. It’s pretty understandable that someone would run away from what God was asking, isn’t it? Have YOU ever run away from what God is telling you? Are you doing some running away right now someplace in your life? I remember in college, I used to go up to St. Mark’s Cathedral on Capitol Hill on Sunday nights for their quiet Compline service. It’s a very meditative spot, with Gregorian chanting through the service. Anyway, one night I was there and a man walked up the middle aisle. He was obviously disheveled and mentally not well. He was muttering to himself, and every once in awhile you’d hear a swear word come out. He didn’t do much, just walked up to the front and around the chancel, then back down the middle aisle. As he passed the row I was sitting in, I felt (don’t ask me how) God tell me to go to the back of the church with him. I knew that couldn’t be God’s voice. But again, this strong sense. I said, “God, this man is obviously disturbed, and I have no experience, no expertise at all in this area. What could I do?” “Just go.”

Then I said, “God, this service has already been interrupted. If I stand up now, I’ll disrupt this congregation’s worship again, and I KNOW you wouldn’t want me to do that.” “Just go.” I didn’t. I kept fighting for perhaps 10-15 minutes, and finally I walked to the back. By then, of course, it was too late. Someone had called for an ambulance or police car, and the man was already being driven away. I felt like I had missed it. Incidentally, I asked a mentor of mine what he thought. I felt like he might commiserate with me, and tell me that it wasn’t God’s voice I was hearing, that I couldn’t have done anything anyway. Instead, he just listened and said “Well, I think you might have missed it!”

There are lots of ways to run away from God. Sometimes we just pretend that we don’t hear anything. Sometimes we hear, but refuse to do anything. That’s what I was doing. Are you running anywhere right now? Maybe God is calling you right now to change some things in your life. To go somewhere. To get rid of an attitude. To do something new. To get help in dealing with a problem. To be honest with someone you haven’t been. If we hear, and don’t do…then we’re running away too, aren’t we?

Jonah heard, and did something…he ran. Ran the diametrically opposite way. Ninevah is way up north and east. Tarshish is way over in Spain, to the west, across the whole Mediterranean. Jonah couldn’t have run in a more opposite direction, really to the ends of the known world. Why? “To flee from the face of the Lord.”

To do this, Jonah goes down to the coast, to Joppa, looking to run from God. And when he gets there, guess what? There’s a boat! And guess where it’s going? Tarshish! There’s a boat waiting. 
 
A friend reminded me this week that whenever we run from what God wants, the means to do it is almost always there. If the temptation is to gossip destructively about someone, you WILL find someone to ply you with a question or listen. If the temptation is towards lust, you WILL find a crummy TV show or movie on. It seems that God doesn’t remove every temptation. So the question is, what will we do to stand against it? Will we pray? Pray with someone else? Confide in a friend? Sign onto a 12-step program for accountability? Whenever you run to Joppa, the boat is always there waiting…so what will you do to stand against the temptation?

Jonah 1:4-5: “Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up. All the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own god.”

So Jonah is on the ship, heading away. The ship is apparently full of sailors from different lands, believing in different gods. Now, I need to distinguish here between two Old Testament words for God, because it is important for this story. One word is ELOHIM. This is the word used for idols and minor gods with the little “g.” The other word used is YHWH, which is the specific name for the personal, covenant-making God of Israel. In most of our translations, ELOHIM is translated God or god, and YHWH is translated THE LORD. So we’re told here that the sailors had their ELOHIMS in their hands. And they are scared, and dialing up the crisis prayer lines. And I have to hand it to this crew…they try everything:

1.  They call on their gods (ELOHIMS)…have an ecumenical prayer meeting right there on the deck. It doesn’t work.
2. They jettison cargo to make the ship lighter, and easier to weather the storm. It doesn’t work.
3. They wake up Jonah, asleep in the very bottom hold of the ship, and say, “Call on your god, too! WE need all the help we can get!” It doesn’t work.
4. They cast lots to see who is responsible, and of course Jonah wins. And so they begin to (still respectfully, I think) quiz Jonah: Who is responsible for this trouble? What do you do? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?”

Now Jonah has a great chance to redeem himself. He can share all about his god, YHWH, he can witness, testify, convert, save, preach. But he blows it again. All he really does is give a very quick answer to their last question: “I am a Hebrew and I worship the LORD (not Elohim, but YHWH), the God of heaven who made the sea and the land.”

The sailors hear this, and they are scared. What should they do? Again, I have to hand it to them. Jonah tells them that he is responsible, and they should just throw him overboard and everything will be okay. If it was me, I think I would’ve tossed him right then! But they keep trying. They try rowing closer to shore, but the storm is too big. Finally, they pray “Lord…” NOT ELOHIM, buy YHWH! They begin to pray to Jonah’s God! They say, “God, don’t hold us responsible…but we’re throwing him in.” And they do, and it works. And then do you know what they do? They WORSHIP! They worship Jonah’s God, YHWH! So, Jonah messes up, two times. Yet somehow, no matter how much Jonah messed up…he wasn’t going to mess God up. God was going to reach out to those sailors (and the Ninevites), and he wanted to use Jonah. But with him or without him, He was reaching out.

That is reassuring to me. I don’t know about you, but when I think of sharing God with people, I think I have to have every conceivable answer, to be living a perfect life, to have absolutely pure motives, to have the right technique. Then I look at Jonah. It’s downright laughable. You call this a missionary? Well, actually, not really. We call God a missionary God. God WILL reach people.

Years ago, Anne and I worked with high school kids. I had one guy named John that I desperately wanted to know Christ. I knew him for at least two years, and went to all sorts of ballgames and hung out, investing time in John. Finally, we ended up at a weekend camp, and it was the right time. I think I was sweating, I was so nervous thinking about just how to ask him. Finally, I said, “John, …err, what do you think about Jesus?” He said, “Oh, I’ve been ready to commit my life for a couple of months now…I was wondering when you’d ask!” See, God is working…it’s God’s thing. We get to just participate in what is being done. If God could take rebellious, stiff-necked, running-away Jonah and bring good…there’s nothing He can’t do!

That’s reassuring to me. We don’t have to be perfect or wonderful for God to do great work. Paul Tournier once said: “The most wonderful thing in this world is not the good that we accomplish, but the fact that good can come out of the evil that we do…Our vocation is, I believe, to build good out of evil. For if we try to build good out of good, we are in danger of running out of raw material.” It’s the amazing thing about the God we follow….even out of bad, good can come.

Jonah 1:17: “But the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights.” God provides, even appoints, a fish. And Jonah gets three days to think it over. Three days to lay inside a dark, smelly, foul, gloomy, uncertain place. Three days, like the three days that Christ lay inside a dark tomb. Now, something happened in the belly of that whale. We don’t even know exactly what. But something happened. God used the inside of that fish to shape Jonah. The situations that God uses to mold us and change us are not always what we would choose.

Jonah thought he was going on a pleasure cruise…not a fish ride. He though he was getting a one-way ticket, but God sent him round trip. God dealt with Jonah in that fish.

Aldous Huxley once wrote a poem about Jonah inside the whale:

“Seated upon the convex mound
of one vast kidney, Jonah prays
and sings his canticles and hymns,
making the hollow vault resound
God’s goodness and mysterious ways,
Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.” 

What happened in the fish? We don’t know. Jonah goes in. Prayer comes out. Now, it’s not so amazing that Jonah is praying. After all, Jonah is in a crisis. We ALL pray when we’re in trouble. What’s amazing is WHAT Jonah prays. Not a lament, not a woe-is-me…but pure thanksgiving. And not just what he makes up, but right out of the Psalms.

From Jonah, chapter 2: From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. He said: “In my distress I called to the Lord and he answered me (Psalm 120). From the depths of the grave I called for help, and you listened to my cry (Ps. 30-31). …the deep surrounded me, seaweed was wrapped around my head (Ps. 69)…But you brought my life up from the pit, O Lord my God (Ps. 103).… I, with a song of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you (Ps. 116). What I have vowed I will make good. Salvation comes from the Lord (Ps. 3)."

Jonah doesn’t just pray. He grabs prayers right out of the Hebrew prayer book, the Psalms. It’s probably a great lesson for us in having the scriptures inside of us, of meditating on them and memorizing them. When times get tough, they come to the surface as a resource. When times got tough for Jonah, what came to the surface was thanksgiving. Now, being thankful didn’t take Jonah out of a crummy situation. And I don’t hear him being thankful for getting into the crummy situation. But the prayers of thanksgiving cause Jonah to remember where salvation lies. It reopens communication with God. God is dealing with Jonah.

The last verse of chapter 2 just says, “And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.” YECCH! It only goes to show us, as one writer noted, that the fish was more obedient than Jonah! It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, the lengths to which God will go to reach people…downright foolish.

But then, that’s one of God’s trademarks, isn’t it? Seven hundred years later, God’s foolishness strikes again…this time in Jesus. Jesus believed in Jonah, by the way. In three different places in the gospels, Jesus mentions Jonah…all in the context of amazement. Jesus is amazed that people will not listen to him. After all, he said, even the Ninevites end up listening to Jonah and turning and finding God. And now, in Jesus himself, one infinitely greater than Jonah had come…to call people to turn, and find God. A God whose love was so great it spilled out onto a cross. A cross that seemed to some even more foolish than any fish story. That’s why Paul could write: “…for the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” 

So we’ll leave old Jonah there on the beach, no doubt exhausted and overwhelmed and in deep, deep need of a shower. Still humming a hymn of thanks that came to him in the belly of the fish. And next week we’ll see what happens when God calls him again, and gives him a…second chance.