Our Call to Nineveh

 This is a sermon I wrote for a short worship service for the chancel choir of First Congregational UCC of Bellevue, Washington, on retreat, but I decided not to give it. It isn't a bad sermon I think it's reasonably good. But I decided it didn't fit the context of a choir retreat. So I wrote something else for that service that I'll post in a day or two. Here's the one I wrote but didn't give

Our Call to Nineveh

September 24, 2023

for

First Congregational UCC of Bellevue

Choir Retreat

Jonah 3:10-4:3

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We all know the story of Jonah, don’t we? Here’s a refresher on it. God tells Jonah to go prophesy in Nineveh, that great city. Do you all know what Nineveh was? It was a real place. It was the capital of the Assyrian Empire and was located in what today is Iraq. The Assyrian Empire is the one that, in 722 BCE, conquered and destroyed the Hebrew kingdom of Israel. Jews around that time hated and feared Assyria. Yet that’s where God tells Jonah to go. There he is to “cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.” Jonah 1:2. Jonah must have thought something like, “Yeah. Sure. I don’t think so!” Instead of going to Nineveh like God told him to do, he flees in the opposite direction, to Tarshish, which was probably located in Spain. Here’s what happens next. A great storm comes up, and Jonah ends up overboard in the sea. He gets swallowed up by a whale. He’s in the whale for three days, then he ends up on a beach in a pool of whale vomit. Finally Jonah gives up. He goes to Nineveh and prophesies against it. Everyone there from the king on down immediately repents in sackcloth and ashes. God relents and does not destroy the city as God supposedly had intended to do.

Jonah gets really mad at God because God didn’t destroy Nineveh. He’s mad at God, but what he says to God is a bit puzzling. He says something like “I ran away from you, God, because I know how gracious, kind and forgiving you are.” God’s not impressed. After a few twists and turns the story ends with Jonah sulking outside the city.

Every time I hear this story I ask the same question: Why would Jonah flee from the God he characterizes here? He describes a God who is a God of unconditional grace. Jonah’s description of God fits perfectly with the Christian confession that God is love. The God of this passage is, is seems, a God to be trusted, loved, worshipped, and followed, not a God to run away from. So why did Jonah flee to Tarshish?

I can only give you what I believe to be a good Christian explanation of why anyone would want to flee from this God of grace. See, God’s grace is free, but it isn’t cheap. We don’t have to earn it. It is God’s free gift. That, however does not mean that God has no expectations of us. It doesn’t mean that there is no response God calls us to make to God’s grace. When we truly understand God’s unconditional love, grace, and forgiveness for every one us, indeed, for every person who has ever lived or ever will, we know that God calls us to do no less than to turn the world upside down. God calls us to reject the world’s sinful ways of judgment, exploitation, and violence and instead to embrace God’s ways of forgiveness, justice, and nonviolence. Which, I think, sounds a whole lot easier than it is. We’ve all lived with those sinful ways of the world our whole lives. It’s easy for us to take them just as how things are. Moreover, the world wants and even demands that we take them just as how things are. That’s what almost everyone does.

God calls us to a different way, but the world doesn’t much like it when someone prophesies against those sinful ways of being, when someone tries to live God’s values of grace, of love in action. It fights back. Truly standing up for God’s ways can at the very least make you a social outcast. If you doubt that, try speaking out publicly against American militarism and nationalism and see what happens. Sometimes the world kills the prophets of God’s way. It even killed Jesus, the ultimate prophet of those divine ways of being. Advocate nonviolence the way Jesus did, and the world will call you a coward. Advocate distributive justice for the poor and the world, or at least the American public, will call you a socialist (as though that were necessarily a bad thing). Indeed, when you really think about it, it’s not that hard to understand why Jonah wanted to flee from a God who wanted him to proclaim God’s divine values in a place thoroughly committed to the sinful values of the world. Jonah had every reason to fear how that place would respond.

And here’s the thing. God calls us to go to Nineveh and proclaim God’s ways too. Only our Nineveh isn’t an ancient city in Mesopotamia. It is right here. Where we live. It is our country and our culture. It is our nation, which spends nearly as much on its military as the rest of the world combined while the nation is filled with the unhoused and those with no meaningful access to health care. It is our nation that is starting to think that the solution to racism is to pretend that it doesn’t exist and that it never has. It is our nation that thinks violence is the real answer to a whole range of problems from personal disputes to international conflicts. It is our nation that has treated God’s good earth as expendable in the name of profit. Oh yes. Our home is our Nineveh.

So how will we respond. Will we flee to Tarshish? Will we flee from the call of our God of boundless grace? Or will we stand up, speak out, and bear the consequences of our doing so? Perhaps you have already done some or even a great deal of what God’s wants from us, but there is always more to do. The choice of whether or not to do it is ours. I think we all know what the proper Christian choice is. Will you have the courage to make that choice? Will I? Amen.