Advent Lutheran Church

"Core Convictions (Epiphany 3)"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            We like people with clear, solid convictions.  Solid convictions, the thinking goes, are an indication of solid character.  Politicians like to toss mud at each other in the form of a label, “flipflopper.”  We’ve heard that term a number of times in this campaign season.  The implication is that if a candidate shifts position on an issue, that’s an indication of flimsy convictions, and that’s evidence of weak character.  We don’t like that; we like people to have solid convictions, people like Jonah, the Old Testament prophet.

            Jonah had strong convictions, chief among them being the certainty that there are basically two groups of people in this world: the righteous and the unrighteous.  The righteous are the people who follow God’s divine law, and the unrighteous are the people who don’t.  Jonah’s people, the people of Israel, obeyed the law and, because they did, would gain God’s approval.  The unrighteous people, on the other hand, rejected the law and, because they did, would be judged by God, and judged harshly.

            This was the chief conviction by which Jonah constructed his life.  After spending three days in the belly of a very large fish, Jonah developed some new convictions, chief among them the belief that God is very tough to figure out, especially when God sends you somewhere that you don’t want to go.

            Most of us have some core convictions about life.  Whether we examine them or not is another matter, but most of us tend to have them.  Maybe a core conviction of yours is that if you apply yourself and work hard and navigate the obstacles and barriers that life inevitably sets in your path, you’ll be successful.  Maybe a core conviction is that if you eat right and exercise regularly, you’ll stay healthy.  Or perhaps a conviction is that if you play by the rules – do what you’re supposed to do and not do what you’re not supposed to do – life for you will turn out basically OK. 

Convictions are good, they’re necessary and foundational for us; they form the base on which we construct our lives.  But what if God rewards your careful planning and living by putting you someplace that you don’t want to be?

When God tapped Jonah on the shoulder the first time and told him to go to Nineveh and do the work of a prophet – call the inhabitants of the city to repentance and to turn to God – Jonah responded by turning around and heading in the opposite direction.  And he did it because he knew that if he took the mission that God assigned him, God would have mercy on the people who Jonah warned.  And that’s the last thing in the world that Jonah wanted.

Nineveh was a major city in what is now Iraq.  In fact, it’s thought to have been what is now Mosul, where a lot of fighting has taken place over the last few years.  In the ancient world it was the capital of the nation of Assyria, and Israel and Assyria were the bitterest of enemies.  The animosity, the hatred between these two peoples was deep and long-standing.  So when God sent Jonah to warn the people of Nineveh, Jonah responded by heading to Tarshish.

Ah, Tarshish.  It was a place of unimaginable splendor and unlimited possibilities, a dream destination.  Actually, we don’t know if Tarshish was a real place in the ancient world.  Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.  Whatever; Tarshish for you is wherever you would really rather be.  Nineveh, on the other hand, is the place where you actually are in your life.  It might not be the place you planned to be or want to be, but for whatever reason it’s the place where life has put you for the time being.

Maybe for you Nineveh is a particularly hard relationship with your spouse or partner, a relationship that just seems to have run out of joy.  Or maybe for you Nineveh is the job where the stress is so intense that it’s like living in some never-ending frustration dream where you never seem to make progress and every step you try to take toward your goal only leaves you farther from it.  Or perhaps Nineveh is your personal lament where you wonder, “When is my life going to start?  I feel like I’ve been on hold forever.”  Nineveh, that place where you never intended to go and do not want to be.

There’s something to remember about Nineveh: You are not there because God is punishing you, and you are not there because God has forgotten you.  Whatever landed you there in the first place – whether it was your own choice or God’s mysterious wisdom – now that you are there, God has something for you to do; God has a mission for you to accomplish there, and it is a mission that is uniquely for you.

In the 4^th Century, Bishop Basil of Caesarea ordained his younger brother, Gregory, into the priesthood.  The first assignment he gave his brother was to send him to the city of Nyssa.  Now, Nyssa was about as uninteresting a place as you can imagine.  Nothing ever happened in Nyssa.  No priest ever started a successful priest career by going to Nyssa.  So Gregory complained about his assignment to his brother the bishop.  And the bishop said, “I am sending you to Nyssa not to confer a blessing upon you; I am sending you to Nyssa so that you might confer a blessing on that place.”

If you are in a hard place, someplace you don’t want to be, the question to ask is not What did I do to deserve this?, but rather How will God use me to bless this place?  How will I make this a holy place?

So it was that Jonah finally decided to let God be God, and he accepted the assignment to go to Nineveh and warn the people to repent, to change their ways and to turn to God.  Now we know that Nineveh was a bad place; the Bible describes it as “evil” and “violent.”  But God didn’t want to judge the place for its evil; God wanted to redeem the place.  And that’s where Jonah ran into trouble with God.  Where Jonah saw people only in terms of “us” and “them,” God saw people only in terms of “mine.”

There is a literary device in the Jewish scriptures called midrash, which seeks to interpret Biblical stories.  These vignettes are not holy scripture, but they are instructive in teaching us certain attributes of God.  There is a midrash that the rabbis tell around the story of the Exodus.  You remember the scene: the waters of the Red Sea miraculously part and the people of Israel safely walk across the dry sea bed onto the distant shore, and the waters close in and envelop the pursuing Egyptian army.  Here’s where the midrash begins: In heaven, the angels are celebrating, singing and dancing and rejoicing over the safety of the Israelites.  And God asks them, “Why are you celebrating?”

The angels say, “Because your people the Israelites are safe!”  And God says, “Stop your celebrating.  How can I rejoice when my people the Egyptians lie dead on the shore?”  With God, there is no “us” and “them.”

The people of Nineveh were God’s people too, only they didn’t know it.  It was Jonah’s job to tell them.  Which he did.  The Bible tells us that Nineveh was a large city, that it took three days to walk from one end to the other.  But Jonah only had to go a third of the way before his message took hold, and the citizenry decided to turn to God.  God was so overjoyed that he changed his mind about wiping them all out.  This is exactly what Jonah was afraid of.  In the next chapter of the story, Jonah vents, lets God have it. “Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. ³And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”  Jonah was convinced that people should be divided into righteous and unrighteous, and part of the fun of being righteous is that you get to see the unrighteous being hammered.  But God trumped Jonah’s conviction with one of God’s own: God’s eagerness to have mercy.

There can be an enormous disconnect between human conviction and divine conviction, and when there is, we need a wake-up call.  We might have gotten one this past week in the form of a video that has gone viral on the internet.  It’s called “Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus.”  Have you seen it?  Plenty of people have: as of this morning the video that was posted 10 days ago had been viewed over 16 million times.  It’s a spoken-word poem by a young man who delivers a scathing critique of the organization of religion, of Christianity without Christ, if you will.  Here’s just a sampling:

If religion is so great, why has it started so many wars?
Why does it build huge churches, but fails to feed the poor?
The problem with religion is that it never gets to the core,
It’s just behavior modification, like a long list of chores.
I’m just saying be careful of putting on a fake look,
Because there’s a problem if people only know that you’re a Christian by that little section on your Facebook
In every other aspect of life you know that logic’s unworthy
It’s like saying you play for the Lakers just because you bought a jersey

            We’re going to talk about this video in Pastor’s Class next Sunday morning, about the massive response that it has inspired, and about our own reaction to it.  So far there has been much agreement with this young man’s frustration, frustration with so-called “religious” people who are so sure about what they’re sure about without consulting God about what they’re so sure about.

            Jonah preached an eight-word sermon, and an entire city dropped to its knees in repentance, and God had mercy.  Yet neither repentance nor mercy was in the heart of the prophet himself.  Jonah resented the blessing that came to his enemies even as he expected that same blessing for himself.  But God doesn’t work that way.  God is not a bookkeeper.  God does not give any of us what we deserve; God gives us what we need.  It’s called grace.  It isn’t fair.  And we can thank God for that.

            Amen.