SERMON – “A Whale of Tale”

Bless thou, the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts
that they be of profit to us and acceptable to thee, oh our rock and
our redeemer. Amen

Today I want to tell you a whale of a tale, it is about the prophet Jonah, and perhaps it too is about us.
Jonah was a man of faith, a man who loved his God and his people, yet Jonah got himself into a mess of trouble.

It all began when the word of God came to Jonah in a dream.

In this dream God told Jonah to leave Israel and to go to the great city of Ninevah and to preach against it because of its great wickedness.

God’s opinion of Ninevah did not come as a great surprise to Jonah, the evil of Ninevah was known throughout the world.

Ninevah was an ancient city, built in the dim recesses of time by Nimrod, the mighty warrior, and the violence of Nimrod seemed to have been stamped upon his city – it was a den of iniquity and the source of much suffering upon the face of the earth.

So Jonah was told by God to go and preach against the wickedness of Ninevah and to warn the people there that the city would be destroyed forty days after he arrived.

Jonah was a man who hated evil and so we might assume that he would be willing to deliver this message of doom to the city of Ninevah. Yet – as the Book of Jonah tells us, Jonah wants nothing to do with delivering this message of warning and judgment.

Instead of answering God’s call to him to go to Ninevah, Jonah tries to flee in the opposite direction. The Bible says that Jonah ran away from God.
Instead of making the 500 mile trip eastward from Jerusalem Jonah boards a merchant ship at the port of Joppa and heads towards Tarshish, a city some 2000 miles to the west.

Why did Jonah do this? Why did he refuse to deliver God’s message to Ninevah?
Many of us I am sure are tempted to think it was because Jonah did not want to see thousands of people die. But this is not the case, as we shall see.

Our whale of a tale continues with Jonah at sea, when the ship he is on is caught in a huge storm.The storm is so bad that the ship begins to come apart at the seams.The sailors are terrified.

Each man prays to his own god for salvation, and they run to and fro throwing the cargo into the sea, hoping against hope to lighten and therefore save the ship, but to no avail.

Instead the storm gets worse and it seems that the ship is about to founder.Working on the theory that where the various gods of the crew have failed, perhaps the god of his passenger might succeed, the Captain of the ship goes below to ask Jonah to pray for the ship’s salvation.

To the Captain’s horror he finds Jonah fast asleep, the ship is in mortal peril, and yet Jonah snoozes; He does not seem to care.

Meanwhile the fear of the crew is increasing moment by moment, and being both desperate and a superstitious bunch they decide that someone on board must have made a god angry and so they cast lots to determine what person is responsible for causing the storm.

The lot fell to Jonah and honest man that he was, he confessed to the crew that he was running away from the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land. This confession frightens the crew even more and they ask him: “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!”, and as they ask, the storm gets even worse, the seas become rougher and rougher, and so finally, in desperation, they ask Jonah:
“What shall we do to you to make the sea calm down for us?” Jonah was a man of faith, a man who loved his God and his people. He was also a man of conscience, and to his credit he tells the crew,
“Pick me up and throw me into the sea and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you.” The crew refuses to do what Jonah suggested to them. Instead they break out the oars and attempt to row the ship back to land.

But they are not successful. The seas became even wilder, the waves became even higher, and finally they have to give up, and they cry out to the God of Jonah, they cry out to our God, they ask forgiveness for what they are about to do, they ask forgiveness for taking the life of an innocent man, and they take Jonah – and they toss him overboard.

Almost immediately the storm abates and the crew is once again afraid, afraid because they realize that they have encountered a truly powerful God, and they offer a sacrifice to the Lord and make vows to him.

As for Jonah, well he was swallowed by a great fish, some say it was a whale, and for three days and three nights he was in the belly of that whale, where, as you can well imagine, he prayed to God.

In his prayers Jonah thanks God for saving him from drowning, and he promise God that he will once again seek to do his will, that he will make sacrifice at the temple to him, and do for God all that he has vowed to do.

God hears the plea of Jonah, and as the ancient ones tell the story, the Lord commands the fish, and it vomits Jonah onto the dry land.

Gives you kind of a vivid picture doesn’t it? I think the story is told this way for a purpose. I think that we are meant to understand that for all Jonah’s good points, the whale couldn’t stomach Jonah for very long.
I say this because of what happens next in this whale of a tale.

God once again commands Jonah to go to Ninevah and proclaim to it the message that He had given him.
Jonah has learnt his lesson, he keeps his vows and he obeys – he goes to Ninevah, to that great and wicked city, a city so big that it requires three days to see it, and he proclaims the message of God, saying: “Forty more days and Ninevah will be overturned”.

The rest of the story you know.

The people of Ninevah, from the least who lived in slums and stole for a living to the greatest who lived in luxury & grew fat on injustice, every single one of the Ninevites repented, they gave up their evil ways
and they put on sackcloth and ashes and fasted and prayed to God for mercy.

The people were so desperate that they even dressed their animals in sackcloth and caused them to observe the citywide fast.
And God saw the repentance of Ninevah and he had compassion, and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.

Imagine it if you can.

Imagine if every terrorist today who preaches hate and murder were to suddenly change their minds and lay down their weapons and to pray to Allah, to pray to God, for deliverance from the destruction coming upon them.

Imagine if all the pornographers and thieves and environmentally brutal
corporations were to change their minds about how they lived and worked.

What a cause for celebration it would be! All of us here, all of those in Ottawa and Washington and capitals around the world would sing and dance for joy… It would be so tremendous – so exciting.

But my friends, this is not how Jonah felt.

Even though the miracle that happened in Ninevah was greater than we can imagine, even though it was better than what we could possibly pray for,
Jonah was greatly displeased, and he became angry.

He became angry and he prayed to God saying:

“O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is
why I fled to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and
compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love; a God who
relents from sending calamity. Now, O Lord, take away my life, for
it is better for me to die than to live.”

My friends, how should we understand Jonah?
Why is this incredible story, this just so story, told to us?
Why is it in the Bible?

The answer is in Jonah’s anger, and in the prayer he makes in his anger.
Jonah, as I have said, was a man of faith, a man who deeply loved his God
and his people. He had integrity, he hated what was evil.
Certainly, as his story shows, Jonah was not a man who would do evil himself, that is why he confessed to the crew of the ship that he was running from God and suggested they toss him into the sea.

He was not a man who would bring suffering upon the innocent. But when all this is said, THE FACT REMAINS THAT JONAH hated evil more than he loved good, and this my friends, is the root of his problem.

In this whale of a tale we are told that the reason Jonah fled from God,
the reason that Jonah did not want to go to Ninevah with God’s warning,
and the reason he got so angry at God later on, is because he was afraid that Ninevah would repent and that God would save the city.

Does this seem incredible?
Well, it is. Yet some people I know are unhappy about those among us who
repent of their evil later in life.
They cry out “why should they have all their fun” and then get off the hook at the last moment? Others I know pray for the destruction of their enemies, they long for the grasping rich to loose their wealth the selfishly beautiful to loose their looks, and the brutal bullies of live to be imprisoned so they can claim it For themselves. Last week we watched in awe at the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States. In his address he said that we are a nation of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and others who are all children of God. The next day in the news the Evangelical wing of the church attacked his statement saying they were not children on of God because they didn’t worship the same God we do.

Jonah was not unlike many of us.
He hoped that God would punish evil, that he would utterly destroy Ninevah,
- in much the same way some of us hope that God will get our enemies,
- in much the same way we hope some bad thing will fall upon those who
afflict us or our families and our friends
- in much the same way that we hope with regard to others – that what goes
around will come around – and come around quickly.

Where Jonah differs from some of us is that he knew God does not seek to punish evil for the sake of retribution, he knew that God punishes only so that those who do evil may learn to
repent and to walk in a new way.

However, while Jonah knew the purpose of God’s judgments, Jonah didn’t like that purpose – he hated more than he loved. He desired that the doers of evil die, instead of longing for their salvation, for their change, their conversion to righteousness.

The Book of Jonah is a fantastic story, it is like a just so story, it is a whale of a tale, and it is like that so that it will grab our attention.

We are meant to look at Jonah and his attitude and then consider our own.

Jonah is a model for us of the wrong kind of faith, a model of those who forget the lesson of their own salvation, a model of those who forget that we too deserve to perish, for we too, like Jonah, often flee from God and do not do the things he asks of us.

Are we like Jonah? Do we want to see our enemies destroyed? Or do we want to warn them of their peril, and sincerely hope that they will respond and repent and turn from their evil ways?

The gospel lesson this morning referred to the call issued by Jesus to Simon and Andrew, a call that is issued to us all by our Lord.

Jesus asks us to follow him, and to become “fishers of men” much as he asked Jonah to go and fish for men in Ninevah.

We cannot catch anyone, we cannot bring a good harvest to God, if we desire that all evil people be punished, all that we can do if we desire this is condemn ourselves.

We can only bring a rich catch to Godif we speak God’s word to others, the word he has commanded us to speak through Jesus Christ.

We can only fill the nets for God, if we do what God asks of us, and love our enemies, and do good to those who would hurt us.
God will take of judgement in his own time and way, we are called, like Jonah, to be but his messengers, his followers, the people who call upon others to repent as we repent, the people who call upon others to love as we love. Praise God for his judgement and his mercy upon us and all people who turn to Him in faith and trust. AMEN.

Pastor Bill

Tags: Israel, Jonah, Ninevah, Sermons