Sermon: "Sharing the Message"

5th in the "Jonah" series.
Delivered May 9, 2010 by Rev. Rev. John Schmidt.
Sermon Text: Jonah 3:1-10

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

Well I have a friend who was in ministry and made some mistakes in his life that ultimately led to the fact that he had to leave his pastorate, shake in his marriage, and it's determined a whole lot about the direction of the rest of his life. And one of the questions that comes up at a time like that is, "Can God ever forgive?" and, "Will God ever restore him to any sort of usefulness in the kingdom of Jesus Christ?"

I can share that because even if you knew all of my friends, you wouldn't know which one because it's affected so many. Maybe the drama is not quite so big in your life, but many of us have asked the same question of ourselves, which is, "With all the problems of my life, can God forgive me, and can God use me?"

Now we've been looking into the book of Jonah for a number of weeks, and we've discovered that there is an amazing message of grace here. God wanted to show grace to these Ninevites. That's why he is sending a prophet there to bring bad news in order that God might be able to hold back on judgment. And so God sends Jonah. Jonah decides, "Man, I hate these Assyrians. I don't want them to have a chance to turn around. I'm not going to go."

So Jonah runs in the other direction, tries to run away from God. Running away from God doesn't work. That's one of the lessons in the book of Jonah. It doesn't work. Storm comes. Jonah is thrown overboard. Jonah nearly dies. Jonah is preserved, and that's where the second chapter ends. And so now we're starting the third chapter of the book of Jonah. Jonah has been vomited onto a beach. That's what happened. We don't know where the beach is, but he is not in very good shape. But he has a mission. Let's read about what happens.

This is in the third chapter of the book of Jonah. You'd find it in your Bibles that you find under the chair in front of you on page 844.

"Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time: 'Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.' Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. Jonah began by going a day's journey into the city, proclaiming, 'Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.'"

"The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. Then he issued a proclamation in Nineveh: 'By the decree of the king and his nobles: do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth.'"

"Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.' When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened."

Let's pray: God, we thank you for your Word, and we pray that you'll open it up to our understanding. For we ask it in Jesus' name, Amen.

This chapter of Jonah divides up into three sections. In the first few verses (verses 1 to 4) we see a message about the grace of God to the messenger. Jonah is recommissioned, and he obeys. The second section is the power of God through the message. In other words, Nineveh repents in hearing this message. That's verses 5 to 9. And then the final section is the grace that comes through the message. Verse 10, God relents.

So let's take a look at that first section for a moment. God recommissions Jonah. We've been talking about the fact that there is grace all through this book, unmerited favor from God. God doing something we don't deserve. And chapter 3 is no different. It begins with grace. Verse 1, "Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time." That's a sentence of grace. God gives Jonah a second chance. That's what grace is. Grace is having a second chance. Or as Jesus put it, "Seventy times seven" chances.

When Jonah ran away from God, God could have just picked out another prophet. But he doesn't. God has an investment in Jonah. This book is not just about good news coming to the Ninevites so that they can turn from their evil ways. It's about God restoring a disobedient and broken person. Isn't that great news that Jonah gets another chance? Don't you need a second chance sometimes? Third chance? Five hundredth chance? And that's what grace is about. It's about giving that additional chance.

I got an e-mail last week from a guy somewhere in the United States. I often get correspondence from people who see our website and live in other places. And this guy wrote a question to me, and I'm going to quote. He was desperate to write because he had massively messed up his life with pornography. And not only was he losing his marriage, but he had feared that he had sinned beyond any capacity for forgiveness. And this is what he said: "Can God forgive a Christian like me? I don't see Christians or hear of Christians like me who have done the things that I've done. Do I have hope?"

Short answer. Yes. You do have hope. First of all, if he were a pastor, he would have seen people like he is. Because when the masks are down, he is not alone. We have a God of grace. We have amazing hope. He has amazing hope. We have amazing hope because of who God is, not because of who we are. We serve a God who doesn't give up easily. That's good news. We serve a God of second chances.

So that shows up in verse 1. In verse 2, God gives Jonah his task again. "Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you." God recommissions him to this task. Jonah doesn't get to pick the place. Jonah doesn't get to pick the message either. "Go to this place and share with them this message." And the same is true today for us as Christians.

We have a message already about Jesus being the way to God. And it sometimes embarrasses us. It sometimes causes confusion. Sometimes it's been misused. But we can't change the message in order to appeal to the people around us. The message has been given to us. It's an ageless message from the Creator God who is reaching out to a rebellious, independent world that doesn't even know it's dying. And we've been given that message.

So Jonah goes to Nineveh (verses 3 and 4). It's a great city. It took three days to go through it. What that probably means is that it took three days to make the circuit through the city, stopping at all the places where he would have to preach the message, places like the city gates, temples, marketplaces. It would take three days. It was a big enough city that if he did it all day for three days, he would barely make it through this large town.

Now Jonah's message was only five Hebrew words. I wonder about that message. It's a little longer in English, but it's still pretty short. This is what he said. "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown." Do you think that that's exactly what God told him to say? In other words, "Jonah, say only five Hebrew words. Now you're going to have to translate it into Assyrian, but keep it short."

No evidence in the text, but I doubt it. I think God was sharing his heart. And it was a little bit bigger than these five words, but Jonah went into this with a minimalist attitude. "Okay, God. I'll obey you." Do the minimum. Have you ever done that where God has given you a task, reconciliation, accepting forgiveness, offering forgiveness, sharing something with somebody, serving somebody? And you say, "Yeah, I'll do it, but the bare minimum."

Well that's what Jonah is doing now. He is giving the bare minimum, kind of figuring, "If I show him how bad I am at this, he'll never give me an assignment again." Well, maybe he was doing this out of hate. He really hated these people, and he hated them with just cause. These were an extremely violent people. These were people who put up decorations in their buildings of them torturing people. He had good reason not to love them. And so, but to hate them, I don't know.

And he doesn't want to serve God. For us, it might not be hate of other people that's holding us back. Maybe it's fear. Fear that they're going to make fun of us. Fear that we don't know enough to share. Maybe it's busyness that's holding us back, keeping us from wanting to really serve God because, you know, we know that relationships are so important. "My life is absolutely full. I can't accept another thing, God. Don't even mention it." So whatever it is, like Jonah we hold back.

Jonah says, "Forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown." No hint of a call to repentance. No instructions or specific reasons given. No theology. Just, "Forty more days, and it's all over for you guys. Now I'll go to another place. Forty more days, and it's over for you guys. Now I'll go to another place." If we're not going to be as minimalist as he is, if we're going to try to be a little more obedient about our understanding of what our task is, what are some of the things we have to think about about what it means for us to have a message from God for this generation?

Like Jonah, our message is from the Creator God to a rebelling humanity for everyone. And the thing about this message, it begins with information, and it ends with an invitation. That's one of the characteristics of the gospel that we carry. The information concerns God's work of sending his Son to be a perfect Savior for humanity. That's the information people need to hear.

Then there is a call for invitation to come to this Savior and experience life. Just like Nineveh, people now today, us, we need to repent. We need to recognize we have a problem we can't solve. That going in the direction of our lives formerly isn't going to work, and that we need to turn around and head back toward God. And part of this message of what we invite them to is to believe in something. What are they to believe? They're to believe the promise that God will forgive and restore us if we trust in this Jesus.

Think about all the things that people don't have to understand that first moment. They don't have to have a total doctrine of the divinity of Jesus and all of the ways that it works and how the Trinity is understood. I mean, all those things are part of our message, but they don't have to understand it all and pass a Bible exam before they become a Christian. They recognize that Jesus is God's sovereign solution, God coming out to us in flesh. And that if we will trust in what he did, we can be restored and forgiven. That's the core.

And then we're called to share this message as widely as we can. And that's going to involve some things. One of those things is relationships. Now in Jonah's case, there are no relationships. Jonah didn't know any Ninevites. He went in. He didn't get to know any Ninevites. He left, and probably if given his way, he died without ever knowing Assyrians. But that's not the usual pattern. The usual pattern of what God does with us involves relationships.

And so the call to be God's messenger is a call to relationships with people, needy people, people who are different than us, people who are just like us. And if we don't want to be half-hearted about it, in those relationships they're going to be moments where we tell them the good news, this message, this information, about Jesus. Make it as clear as we can.

And part of that challenge is to remove obstacles because there are all kinds of obstacles in our relationships. After centuries of Christianity being in our culture, people have all kinds of bad images, bad images from personal experience, from TV, from literature. We have to get rid of Christian jargon. We have to avoid being judgmental.

Even something like ServeFest that we did a few weeks ago is part of removing obstacles because one of the prevailing ideas about the Church right now is that it's not good for anything. It's useless! So one out of 50 people feel better if they go. But it's meaningless, and they don't care about anybody else. Something like ServeFest was an opportunity for thousands of Christians to show up and say, "We love this community. God loves this community, and we can show it in practical ways." We're moving obstacles.

And then we have to impress them with the seriousness of the message. That that's part of proclaiming the gospel. Something that Jonah did the least possible. And certainly Jonah didn't do this last one. Urge them to respond. That's part of sharing the gospel. Might not be part of the first conversation we have with somebody, but once the whole of the gospel is shared, there is the moment where we say, "Do you respond to this good news?" Now the thing is Jonah didn't do many of these things at all. And yet what happens?

Let's take a look at the next section. The power of the message. They start to repent. It looks like by the end of day one... It's a three-day journey. By the end of day one, people are already starting to respond to Jonah's message. Now it doesn't... It says in verse 5 that they believed God. It doesn't mean that they became monotheistic Jews. It's not a full conversion, but they are believing God, and they're turning from their evil, and they're starting to say, "I have to live differently in order to avoid... Maybe somehow this God will relent and not punish us."

So they declare a fast and put on sackcloth. Sackcloth was a rough, itchy cloth made out of goat hair. And it was a symbol of repentance, a symbol of being humble, a symbol of being in mourning. And then verse 6, the message gets to the king. The king gets off his throne, takes off his royal robes, sat down in the dust. Now this is the guy who heads up the most powerful and violent people that Jonah can imagine, and he is in the dust after hearing this message. And on top of that, he issues a decree that must be obeyed.

And then in verses 7 to 9, there is a really interesting moment in verse 8. "But let... " Well first of all, "Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink." So people are fasting, and animals are fasting. And then, "Let people and animals be covered with sackcloth." I just find that to be amazing. Goats covered with goat hair. We're supposed to see how extreme this is, how hyperbolic this is.

The least enthusiastic presentation of a prophecy from God in all of Scripture, Jonah saying, "Forty more days, okay, and it's over." The most unenthusiastic presentation has one of the most powerful responses recorded in Scripture. God is having a bit of a moment with us saying that it doesn't depend on the messenger. There is power in the message, and God is already at work. The reason why it has power is not because the words are magic but because God is present through the power of the Holy Spirit to do something. So it's okay for us to laugh a little bit about how crazy Jonah is about all of this, and God still uses him. God was already at work in Nineveh.

Some historians point out... We don't know exactly when Jonah went, but one of the possible windows that Jonah went to Nineveh was right after a period of time that that city had had a series of plagues that killed many, many people there. And so there is a possibility that Jonah came to Nineveh at a time when they had seen so much death in their city that when he said, "You only have forty more days," it was graphically real how close to the edge they were already. And so they were willing to listen.

Think about some of the things going on in our own society today. The collapse of so much of our trust in our economics. The limitations of our technology where we have done things that we can't correct right now in the Gulf. It's not new news. But it's all hitting us now. And as these things escalate, if a word comes from God saying, "Look, America. This is to help you understand the distance between us and my displeasure," maybe we would be more willing to listen.

We never know when God might be doing something already in the life of someone when we share the gospel. I think of a friend of mine 30 years ago. A friend of mine named Susie who was part of a church thing where they were doing door-to-door evangelism. I don't think door-to-door evangelism is a good idea. I don't think it works. I didn't think it worked 30 years ago, and certainly Susie didn't feel like it worked. But she is being dutiful. "I'm part of this group. It's too embarrassing to back out right now." She was the daughter of the pastor.

So she goes to the door of this house, and she presents the most unenthusiastic presentation of the gospel since Jonah. "Blah, blah, blah... God loves you... blah, blah, blah. Do you want to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?" And this lady says, "Yes!" No one was more surprised than Susie. That's why we know this story is because she was telling it to everybody.

Now I don't want to share that for you to go to door to door. That's not the point. It's the point that God is already at work, and it's not your skill that matters. God is at work in lives. And we're not the first person to share with them. We might be part of a long chain of messages they're hearing, and we present an important part of the whole. God is using a bigoted, disobedient prophet in this passage, has restored him, and given him again an opportunity to serve God. And some of us might feel like we share some of that distance from God that Jonah experienced.

Maybe we believe that God has forgiven us, but we can't ever believe that God has forgiven us enough to restore us and to use us, that we're always in some kind of exile for the rest of our lives. "My marriage has failed. Can God ever use me again?" "I totally walked away from God. Can he forgive me for that? Will he ever use me again to serve him?" "Look at the failure in my life. How can I ever be God's messenger?" "I've been deeply hurt. Will I ever heal enough for my hurts to be helpful to anyone else?"

God's judgment on Jonah was a measured strike on his life, never intended to destroy him. Never intended to knock him out of the game, but to shake him and restore him. And that's usually our experience of God's judgment in this life is the opportunity to be restored. God will do the same with us. Yes, we've had these moments. Yes, we've paid a cost. But yes, God can restore. Restore you to intimacy in your relationship with him and usefulness in your life. The message here is God works through weakness. That's what grace is.

Well finally we come to verse 10, the third section of our reading. What happens is that as these people turn back to God, God turns away from the punishment he was going to bring on them. God relents. Actually, the word that's used here in the Hebrew is repents. It's the same word that talks about people turning from sin to God used for God turning from his plans to punish in order to show grace to them. And there is so much humility in God here because God knew that their repentance would be very short-lived.

This nation... If we have the dates right about when Jonah might have happened, this nation soon will destroy Israel. This nation will do atrocities to all kinds of people. And yet God still holds back knowing that eventually they will turn back to their old ways. God does that with us. And ultimately holding back means that in the end, Jesus bears the judgment because whenever God holds back a penalty for sin in our lives, it's not that it disappears.

In this reality, all evil will be judged and punished. It's the way God created this reality. And so what he does is it's not that he goes, "Poof!" and it disappears as if it was never there. He takes it, and it seems to disappear from our lives. But that penalty is then put on Jesus. It means that God willingly takes the penalty on himself. So what we learn about this grace is ultimately reaching out to Nineveh cost God much more than it ever cost Jonah. Reaching out to our world will always cost God more than it will cost us. And yet he still, in love, wants to do it.

So we have that same message of grace. It's good news for a broken world. So the application to this? Let's share this message with just a little bit more enthusiasm than Jonah did.

Let's pray: God, we thank you that you are a God of second chances. And Lord, you know how around this worship space right now there are people. We need those second chances. And so God, we pray for the grace of forgiveness. We pray for the grace of restoration, and we pray that by your Holy Spirit, we might be messengers of good news to the world around us. For we ask it all in Jesus' name, Amen.

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