Sermon: "Wrong Way, Jo"

3rd in the "Jonah" series.
Delivered April 25, 2010 by Rev. Rev. Laura Crihfield.
Sermon Text: Jonah 1:3-17

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"Driver's Manual" series study guide: booklet or ordered page layouts

[Video Clip from Planes, Trains and Automobiles]

"... Wrong side of the highway. He is going to kill somebody!"

"Hey! Hey!" [Horn honking]

"What's going on?"

"That joker wants to race."

"This is ridiculous."

"All right, come on. Let's go. Let's go."

"Put your window down!"

"He wants something."

"Oh, he is probably drunk."

"You're going the wrong way!"

"What?"

"You're going the wrong way!"

"He says you're going the wrong way."

"Oh, he is drunk. How would he know where we're going?"

"Yeah, how would he know? Thank you. Thanks a lot. Terrific. Thank you!"

"What a moron."

"You're going in the wrong direction! You're going to kill somebody! You're going the wrong way!"

"What? Ahhh!" [Laughing]

[Crash]

"Well, this isn't so bad. Yeah, I thought it would be a lot worse than this. They'll be able to buff this out no problem. Oh yeah." [Laughing] "Wow! I mean, that was close. We can laugh about it now. We're all right, you know? The whole... Maybe we should just get my stuff off the road, huh? What do you think? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good idea. Oh my back!"

[end of video clip]

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Hysterical, isn't it? Can you imagine being Steve Martin at that moment that he realizes that they're actually going the wrong way? I'm proud to say, and I'm thankful to say, that I have never been in that situation. I hope that you haven't either. If you do, I'm sure you have a story to tell, and hopefully you didn't think it wasn't quite as bad like John Candy didn't think. "Oh, it's nothing that bad. They can buff this out no problem!"

I'm willing to bet that while I hope that none of us have been in that situation literally, we have all been there metaphorically. That some time or another, we've all gone the proverbial wrong way. Think for a moment about a situation where you did something you knew you shouldn't, or perhaps you didn't do something that you knew you should. Maybe it was something that your spouse or your parents were asking you to do. Maybe it was something your teacher or a job required of you.

Perhaps just maybe it was something God was asking you to do. You knew it, and you chose to go the other direction. Any situation where you knew the choice you should make, and you chose otherwise. The tension that we feel during those moments can be intense and confusing. And unfortunately sometimes if we get any clarity at all, it often happens when the realities of the path that we've chosen are coming toward us like that Mack truck, right? And we begin to feel like Steve Martin does in that clip. Panic is setting in, totally out of control, wondering if it's really the devil behind the wheel. If only reality were as hysterical as that scene.

Well today we're in the middle of our series on Jonah, and we find ourselves face to face with his internal struggle during one of those moments in his life at a time when God clearly called him to extend grace and truth to the people and the city of Nineveh. A call that Jonah was anything but excited about. it's a story that reminds us of our call to the cities and the people around us and forces a close look at how we are so prone so many times to respond the way that Jonah did by going the wrong way.

Perhaps most importantly, this is a story that challenges us to check our own heart and our motivations as we think through our responses to God's call and our willingness or our lack of willingness to be ambassadors of grace. People who extend grace, the love of Jesus, the grace offered to us in Christ to others. We're going to dive into Jonah's struggle today so that we can hear God's Word for us as we face similar situations. Before we do that, though, I want to pray. So will you join me?

Lord God, thank you for your Word. Thank you that your Word is alive. Thank you that it is relevant. Thank you that it speaks to us. Through the power of your Holy Spirit, God, would you speak to us today? Would you allow us to hear what you would have us learn and that you would open our hearts to understand your Word. Come Holy Spirit, come. In the name of Jesus, Amen.

Jonah. We're in the third week of this series, and although we're in the third week, we are only in the third verse. How's that? We're going to power through to verse 17 today. I invite you to follow along. It's on 844 in your Bible in front of you, in the bottom of the seat in front of you. Beginning at verse 3. I'll give you just a second to get there. Hear the Word of God.

"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. 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. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship."

"But Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep. The captain went to him, and said, 'How can you sleep? Get up and call on your god! Maybe he will take notice of us so that we will not perish.' Then the sailors said to each other, 'Come, let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity.' They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. So they asked him, 'Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? What kind of work do you do? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?'"

"He answered, 'I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.' This terrified them and they asked, 'What have you done?' (They knew he was running away from the Lord, because he had already told them so.) The sea was getting rougher and rougher. So they asked him, 'What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us?' 'Pick me up and throw me into the sea,' he replied, 'and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you.'"

"Instead, the men did their best to row back to land. But they could not, for the sea grew even wilder than before. Then they cried out to the Lord, 'Please, Lord, do not let us die for taking this man's life. Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man, for you, Lord, have done as you pleased.' Then they took Jonah and threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm. At this the men greatly feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows to him. Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights."

The story of Jonah. Last week we learned that God indeed called Jonah to go to Nineveh, a city that God clearly cared for and hoped to redeem. This week we see Jonah's reaction. What does he do? He runs away. No apparent debate. No obvious contemplation. He just up and ran literally the wrong way as far away from Nineveh as he could get toward the city of Tarshish.

Now I don't know about you, but I think that to be as blatant in your completely turning from God as he was at that moment, that takes a lot of nerve, right? And it would be easy for us to sit here and judge Jonah's decision to run. But just a little bit of research gives us quick insight into why Jonah may have done so. Nineveh was Assyria's leading city, the headquarters of their most powerful enemy (Israel's most powerful enemy). The Assyrians were utterly cruel in their treatment of their enemies.

I'm not going to go into the grisly details, but Ted Lewis, who is here, who is a member here and a Hopkins professor of Near Eastern Studies, put it this way in an e-mail. He said:

"To extend mercy to the vile Assyrians, once we understand how truly heinous they were, is so extremely unfair that we should on first, even second, thought be right there along with Jonah protesting against it as the vile offenders of war crimes who might have beheaded our relatives in the most gruesome of ways were getting off the hook scot free."

Simply put, Jonah doesn't want to go to Nineveh because he doesn't think they deserve God's grace, and that he doesn't want to give them an opportunity to repent. He doesn't like them. He doesn't like anybody associated with them. They have been cruel to his people, and he doesn't want to go. It's hard to fault him on that one. It's easy to understand his hesitation, isn't it?

But Jonah, we have to realize, wasn't just running from what the Lord asked him to do. He was running from the Lord himself. We see this twice in verse 3 where it says, "But Jonah ran away from the Lord." And then a little later on, "He went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord." Jonah doesn't just fail to go in the direction that God asked him to go. He goes in the exact opposite direction. And by going the wrong way and fleeing from what God asked him to do, Jonah was fleeing from God's very presence. This narrative is really all about Jonah's relationship with the God of grace.

Isn't that true for our lives as well? Think about the situations we were talking about earlier, that tension, the desire for control, or the freedom to go our own way. That desire to run at times. Isn't that all about our relationship with the Lord? This is really important to catch because it speaks to the difficult truth that when we defy God and we run from what God is calling us to do, often (most often, almost always if we're really honest) we're running from God's presence. As much as we might try and we might like it to be so, we can't disobey God's will and expect close communion with him. It doesn't work that way.

So Jonah runs from God, and he goes the wrong way, setting sail for Tarshish far away from Nineveh. He gets on board a ship with a crew who he doesn't know and who doesn't know God, and he flees fooling himself into thinking that he can run from God's presence. "God can't follow me out to sea, can he?" Well that doesn't work, does it? We see in verse 4 where it says, "Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up."

Having just spent a very little time one day at sea last week in relatively calm (a little choppy) waters, I find it amazing and somewhat humorous to think that Jonah would be able to sleep through this storm. Have you ever thought about that? He is just down below slumbering. Now we don't know whether God caused that deep sleep, whether he just was so exhausted emotionally because of what was going on that he just fell into this sleep and was just, you know... We don't know the details of how the sleep happened, but I do find it humorous and amazing really to think that he could sleep during such a violent storm. He is oblivious, right, to what's going on.

He doesn't notice that the crew is panicked, and it's not until the captain comes down that he notices this. We're going to get to that in just a second. What I want to point out here one really important detail that we notice as we think about it (this idea of Jonah trying to run from God). The author here points out that... And it seems like a simple fact that we should just kind of, "Of course this happened." But the fact that it's in there makes it important for us to pay attention to.

The fact that God caused this storm. God caused this storm, and that's a little fact that we need to pay attention to because it points to the truth that even when we run from God, when we try to get as far away as possible, God pursues us. He does everything that's necessary to draw us back to himself. The storm is evidence of that in Jonah's life. God's methods are not always gentle. We may not like them. But God persists because he loves us, and he wants a relationship with us. He wants to draw us back to himself more than anything.

Perhaps some of you here today are going the wrong way. I think probably on some level if we're all honest we all are. What started out as destination paradise has turned into a disaster. You've run from God and are heading for your own Tarshish, whatever that may be. If that's you, please keep listening. You may think that you've left God far behind, but as we'll see in this text, that wasn't true for Jonah, and it's not true for our lives either.

The psalmist reminds us of this in 139 where he says:

"Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
If I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast."

God is with us even in the depths of our despair and our attempts to flee. He loves us that much.

Unfortunately in our text today, Jonah is having a hard time remembering that truth. He is running, God is in hot pursuit, and where is the crew? They are terrified. So scared that the captain of this pagan group comes down below, wakes Jonah up, and tells him to get up and call on his God, hoping that maybe he'll take notice of their situation and save them. Here is Jonah, a committed follower of God being told by pagans that maybe his God would offer grace to all of them. I love it.

It's another one of those details that is so important not to skip over because it's here that the author highlights Jonah's lack of understanding about grace. Jonah of all people was supposed to get it, to realize that God's grace extends to everyone, not just a few. But it's the sailors who seem to understand that more than he does. Even in their disbelief or their unbelief they have some sense that Jonah's God just might save them. At least they hope so, which seems to be more than we can say of Jonah at that point.

It's so easy as believers, isn't it, to be rather Jonah-like in our understanding. He was running because he didn't want the people of Nineveh to be offered grace and a chance to repent. It's easy to be like that, to not get it, to maybe not want to get it, to want to limit grace to those who we think deserve it when in fact no one, including ourselves, could ever do what's necessary to deserve it.

That's what makes it grace, which by its very nature is an undeserved gift. I wonder how often we have to be reminded by those around us that God's grace really is big enough for everyone, that Jesus' death on the Cross was for everyone, that God really does love everyone. Something to think about. But back to Jonah for now.

So after the captain challenges Jonah, the rest of the crew decides in verse 7 that they're going to cast lots, right, and find out who is responsible for this storm, for this calamity as we read. So, of course, the lot falls on Jonah, and they ask him what he has done to deserve God's wrath. Where is he from? What does he do? "What is your career?" Jonah had to be dreading those questions. Remember, he is a prophet, which is the Old Testament equivalent of a pastor.

He of all people should have been willing to respond to God and to God's call and to go do what God was asking him to do. He should have understood God's grace and been willing to extend it far and wide. And of everyone on board... I just love this. Of everyone on board, knowing the way that God operates, he should have known or had some inkling that "perhaps this storm has come upon us because of what I've done." But he doesn't get it. He just doesn't get it.

And that becomes clear in verse 9, which is a little strange that this is where it kind of becomes clear. His response to that question. He says, "I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." Now at first glance, that seems like a pretty great response, right? I wish I could come up with like as crafted a response when people ask me, you know, "What do you do? Who are you?"

But if we look at this text, it's actually not quite as good a response as we might have thought. It's not a typical response to this kind of question, and it gives away part of Jonah's struggle. A more typical response would have been one that made reference to the covenant that God had with his people. Something like, "I'm a Hebrew, and I worship the God of my ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

How ironic that Jonah's response instead refers to the God of the sea when he is in the middle of a raging storm on the very sea that he is saying, "I am worship the God of the sea." I find it to be a sad commentary on the relational kind of distance that Jonah must have been experiencing with God at that point. He is not connected, and it shows.

Again shifting to our experience for a minute. How true this can be in our own lives in those seasons when we feel far away or we're running from God or from what God is calling us to. It's so hard during those times I think to remember that the God we worship is the God of our ancestors, the God of yesterday, the God of today, the God of tomorrow, the God who draws people to himself, including us. The God who meets us wherever we are, even when we don't get it, when we fail to make that crucial connection between faith and action.

It's the God who loves us deeply and who loved the crew on board with Jonah, all of whom by this time are terrified. They already knew Jonah was running from God. He had told them that when he boarded the boat. But now they want to know why. "What have you done to deserve God's wrath?" It's a fair question. Very fair question given that he has gotten them into this situation, right? It's one that deserves an honest answer. And I love this. Jonah doesn't answer.

Did you notice that? He doesn't give an answer. He simply tells them that he is responsible for their troubles, doesn't tell them why, and that they should throw him overboard. "Pick me up and throw me into the sea, and it will become calm. This is all my fault. I need to be punished." Not all exact words out of Jonah's mouth, but that's definitely the message. And here's the unspoken subtext of Jonah's plan. He is going to try and run even farther from God's grace with a self-imposed death sentence. Right? That's what he thinks. "Throw me into the sea (certainly he had to be thinking that he was going to die), and all will be well for you."

Well as before, these pagans extend grace to Jonah, don't they? Rather than follow his orders, they try to save him, and they try to row back to shore. The irony I find to be wonderful and amazing. This group of nonbelievers caring for a man that they don't know, they had no obligation to care for, doing this so that they can protect him. It's the exact opposite of what Jonah did and how Jonah reacted when he was called to care for the people of Nineveh. The crew does what Jonah ran from.

Well even so, in their attempts to row back to shore, we know that they're unsuccessful. And the text says, "For the sea grew even wilder than before." And they realize they don't have a choice but to throw him into the sea, and so they do that. They throw him overboard. And the sea becomes calm. They have seemingly given him what he wanted, which was another escape from God and grace, in his mind, deserved kind of death sentence.

Once again, we see Psalm 139 in action where God extends grace to him even in the depths of the sea, the literal depths of the sea. This time in the form of what? Our text says a big fish. We could say a whale. That's what we all learned. I won't make you sing the song, but we all know it, right? Even this self-imposed death sentence wasn't big enough to separate Jonah from the Lord. In this ultimate moment of failure, God pursued him, provided for him. Clear evidence that God's grace is bigger than our wrong way.

With this last act, Jonah finally literally, right, hits rock bottom. He is in the belly of a whale. And next week we're going to learn that he is finally ready to hear the voice of God. I suppose I would be too if I was in the belly of a whale. For now, there is a key question I think in front of us. Why did God call Jonah to Nineveh? Was it for the sake of the people of Nineveh? I don't think so. Of course God cared about the people of Nineveh. He wanted to redeem the people of Nineveh, but he could have used anyone for that. He could have at least found a little more willing participant for his plan.

I believe God called Jonah not because of what Nineveh needed but because of what Jonah needed. He called him to teach him about grace, to show him that he loved the people of Nineveh despite their incredible sin and evil ways and to teach him what it means to accept that grace himself so that he might be willing to offer it to others, to partner with God. God's grace really is bigger than most of us are willing to admit or perhaps even imagine.

We all have our Nineveh's don't we? Those places where God is calling us to extend his grace, but we'd rather go the other direction. And yet God is calling those of us who have received grace in Jesus Christ to partner with him, to be in that partnership of extending and sharing grace with the world, the whole world, even those places we consider Nineveh. And we learn from Jonah, don't we, that before we can join God, we ourselves have to deeply understand grace and accept grace. If we don't do that, we can't partner with him on it. We have to believe that God's grace is for everyone, and it has to start with us.

Do you believe that? Are you living in the freedom of the grace that's extended to you through Jesus, freeing you to say "yes" when God calls? Or like Jonah, are you running, doing all that you can to escape what God longs to show you and the ways God desires to use you? These are hard questions, even for those of us who have been walking with the Lord for a long time. Perhaps especially for those of us who have been walking with the Lord for a long time.

They're questions that I have wrestled with at various points in my journey of faith, and I still do today on some level. And they hit me. You know, as I was crafting this sermon, I was trying to think of a time when I really felt this, when I really experienced this Nineveh experience in my own life. And the time that just came rushing to the surface was my first call to my first church, which was ninety-nine percent people I absolutely loved and one percent (maybe not even quite that many, small handful of people) who I didn't like. I didn't like them. I felt like they were... And, you know, I was not alone in this.

They were kind of troublemakers. They really weren't wanting to clue in to what God was trying to do there. They were negative. They were gossipers. I mean, just the whole thing. And I didn't like them. I had this sense with the other pastor that God was going in a certain direction and that God wanted to grow this church, and these folks just were naysayers all the way along. And I didn't like them. They were mean. They were cruel in what they said. They were not about the cause of Christ, at least in my opinion, there. And I didn't want to love them. I didn't want to serve them. I didn't want to be nice to them.

There were a lot of problems in that congregation because of that very small group of people. Did God call me to that congregation to solve those problems? No, they were still there when I left. God called me to that congregation because I needed to learn what it meant to love people who were hard to love and love people who were not appearing (at least on the surface) to be about what God was trying to do to grow his people and his kingdom.

It took a lot. I made a lot of mistakes. I had to learn to accept grace as I was making those mistakes, young and fresh out of seminary. And God was gracious. But that was a Nineveh for me. I didn't want to stay. I didn't want to work through it. I didn't want to. I didn't want; I didn't want; I didn't want. God calls us places like Jonah because of what we need. God called me to that first call because of what I needed to learn about grace. I needed to understand what it meant to love like Jesus loves, unconditionally extending God's grace to those around me.

I wonder if God is speaking the same to some of you, the same message, with situations that you are in. Your Nineveh's. Whatever that is. Whether that is emotional places that God is asking you to go, literal physical places God is asking you to go, relational places that for you feel like Nineveh and you don't want to go.

Is God trying to teach you what it means to be partners with him in grace? Are you willing to believe that God's grace is bigger than anyone's sin? Again, these are hard questions, but until we face them and wrestle with them and deal with God on them, it will be impossible, I believe, for any of us to fully partner with God on this journey of grace that he is on in redemption for the world.

God is inviting us, each one of us, individually whether it's accepting that grace for the very first time, believing for the first time that Jesus died for you, or for those of you who have walked with Jesus for a long time, learning on a new level in a new way what it means to be people of grace who have our Nineveh's, but are willing to go there because we want God to use us. God is inviting. He is on a journey with this world. We're invited to be partners with him in that process. Are you willing to accept that invitation? Let's pray.

Lord God, thank you that you invite us, that you are on a journey redeeming this world, God, through your Son, Jesus Christ, first and foremost. God, help us to be people who fully, deeply grasp grace first of all for our own lives and then for the lives of those around us, even those places, God, where we might feel like you are calling us to go to Nineveh. God, help us to trust you. Help us to walk with you in a way that allows you to guide our steps. God, help us to do that first and foremost by realizing and understanding that grace is sufficient and available to us individually because of what Jesus Christ has done for us. Thank you, Lord. In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.

© 2010, Rev. Rev. Laura Crihfield
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org