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January 25, 2015
Jonah 3:1-10
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, 2 “Get up, go to
Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” 3 So Jonah set out
and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an
exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. 4 Jonah began to
go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and
Nineveh shall be overthrown!” 5 And the people of Nineveh believed God;
they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
6 When
the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his
robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7 Then he had a
proclamation made in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: No
human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not
feed, nor shall they drink water. 8 Human beings and animals shall be
covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from
their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. 9 Who knows? God
may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we
do not perish.”
10 When
God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his
mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did
not do it.
Sermon: The Day
God’s Mind Changed
Once
upon a time, God was all there was. Then
God made all we see, and even those infinitesimal specks of creation we
don’t. And it was good. And God made human beings, freely giving them
a garden in which to live and all of creation with which to survive. And it was very good. But one day, the people changed.
A
temptation within them we name a serpent but might as easily name pride or
power or sin grew, telling them they could be greater than this Creator. And so the people changed.
This
change grieved God, but God covered their shame with clothing anyway. God knew that no longer could this people be
satisfied with the simple garden, and so they were sent out to go, to explore,
to hopefully be changed for the better some day.
But
things did not get better. The first
people had two sons and one murdered the other.
God watched humanity change into a jealous, bitter distortion of what
God had made, and wept.
The
people on Earth multiplied, and with them, so did their prejudice. The blood feud of brothers became the
bloodshed of mighty armies, and there was much wickedness. One day, God couldn’t take it anymore. God looked at the hearts of all the earth and
God was sorry to have ever made them. It
was a dark day. In anger, God decided to
destroy them.
Well,
not quite all of them. God spared a man
named Noah and his family. The rain
came, and the waters rose, and Noah, having built a big boat was spared, along
with many animals. But that was all –
the rest, every man, woman and child, every other creature, perished. And God’s tears salted the oceans as the
water covered the face of all the earth.
We will never understand how the Creator could do such a thing.
But
eventually, the sun came out. The waters
dried up and those few survivors wandered onto dry land. God broken with grief, then made a promise:
“Never again.” God said. “Never again
will I punish all the earth for human sinfulness.”
Once
again the people multiplied as did the animals, and the earth was filled. Sometimes, those people did what was right by
God. Often, they did not. Nations arose from estranged siblings and God
protected the most vulnerable among them, a tiny wandering group of
Israelites. God guided them, saved them
from slavery and continued to care for them.
Because that’s who God had decided to be after that great flood.
But
God didn’t just think of that small band of wanderers. God also thought of other tribes and
nations. God saw that people were once
again giving themselves over to wickedness, changing for the worse, and God did
grieve. One particular people – the
Ninevites of Assyria – were persistent in their wickedness.
And
so God sent a man having the same letters in his Hebrew name as Noah, a man
named Jonah. Jonah was part of that
wandering tribe, but was sent to his enemies the Ninevites to call them to
change. But Jonah didn’t really believe
that people could change. And so he decided
not to waste his time. He ran from God –
something those first two humans had tried to do in that garden so long
ago. But running from God is like trying
to run from your own breath.
God
found Jonah on a boat (a much smaller boat than Noah’s, mind you) and caused
the sea to churn and turn until Jonah was willingly thrown overboard. Unwilling to let people drown for their
sinfulness again, God made a large fish swallow Jonah. In the belly of that fish, Jonah tried to
change. He told God he was sorry and
that deliverance belonged to God and, whether Jonah really meant it or not, God
saved him, setting his feet right back on the dry land that would lead to
Nineveh.
Jonah
begrudgingly told that city, “40 days more and Nineveh will be overthrown.” Perhaps 40 days was somewhere deep in his
mind after being raised on the stories of his namesake, Noah. There was no grace in his message, though. Just judgment. Like I said, he didn’t really believe people
could change.
But
this story isn’t about people changing, though they did do just that. The people covered every single thing – every
child, every grandmother, every king, every camel, even!—in the sackcloth of
repentance. It was like a massively
grand gesture proving to God they could change.
You see, God always believes people can change. But again, this story isn’t about people
changing. When God saw the repentance of
those wicked Ninevites, scripture tells us God changed God’s mind. GOD CHANGED.
Actually
the word in the language of those people in that time would be that God “was
sorry.” The same word used when God was
sorry to have made those people in Noah’s day.
But this time, God wasn’t sorry to have made them. This time, God was sorry to have nearly
brought great destruction upon them – the destruction God had promised Noah and
his children God would never do again.
Those
Ninevites – animals and all – lived, because God’s mind changed. You can be sure Jonah wasn’t happy about it
at all. You see, in the end his belief
that people can’t change only led him to prove that he couldn’t.
The
story went on and on, and I don’t have time to go into all of that, but let me
just say that, in holding the tales of Noah and Jonah together – as so many
things indicate that we should from those same letters in their names, to the
number 40, to the language of God being sorry, to a life boat, to a watery
repentance – we learn such an essential truth, a truth perhaps we’re afraid to
even say, in fear it might threaten our pre-conceived ideas about the constancy
of God.
That
truth is this: God can change. God can do anything God pleases, in
fact. But when God does change, these
stories show us that it is a change from judgment to grace, from giving up on
us to giving us another chance, from destruction to salvation.
Jonah
was wrong. People can change, just like
God can. In fact, people can’t help but
change. It’s just that often we get the
changing wrong: where God changes for the better, we often change for the
worse, as we let our prejudice and fear and anger get the better of us, just as
humankind has always done. But even
then, there is hope.
We
can always drape our lives in sackcloth, though these days we might call that
the words, “I’m sorry.” We can always be
changed for the better.
We
are changing, no matter what. Let it be
away from hate and towards love, away from prejudice and towards acceptance,
away from retaliation and towards forgiveness.
If
God can change, as this story tells us God can, then so can we. We can change from living smaller lives than
God made us to live, to living with bravery and boldness.
We can change from letting money or status or safety guide our actions, to being guided by vision and trust in God. We can change from perpetuating cycles of “us-and-them” and “me first” to thinking of our own needs only after we’ve tended to the needs of those we would call enemies.
We
can change…because when God made us once upon a time, God called us very good,
and though we sinned, we never totally lost that goodness. We can rediscover it…we can change for the
better.
Thanks
be to our gracefully changing God, to the Son who showed us that change can
mean resurrection, and to the Spirit who stirs within us the courage to change,
every day of our lives, every moment, amen.