The Day God's Mind Changed

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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.