Fish Story (Jonah 3:1-10)

 

Let me tell you a story.  It’s about a Hebrew man named Jonah, son of Amittai, son of . . . well, I’m sure Amittai was the son of someone, but I don’t know who it was.  And this Jonah was how shall we say it?  A single-minded fellow, and the single thing on his mind was himself.  And one day, he was sitting out the heat of the day under the awning of his father’s tent, when the word of the Lord came upon him.  Now, I’m sure you’ve heard of all the ways the word of the Lord has come upon folks, and it never seems to be the same way twice.  It came to Moses out of a burning bush, and to Isaiah branded in red-hot coals on his mouth, and poor old Ezekiel was forced to choke it down in the form of a musty old scroll.  This time, however, it was just a voice, a great, big, booming, intimidating voice.  And I kind of think that God tailors the word of the Lord to fit the hearer, because intimidating was just the right tone to take with Jonah, son of Amittai.

And here is what the word of the Lord said: “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.”  And because of this, it didn’t look good for the Ninevites: in those days, when a peoples’ wickedness was brought to the attention of the Lord, their days were often numbered.

And to Jonah as well, it was pretty clear what God wanted of him: God wanted him to become a prophet. Indeed, the phrase “go to Ninevah and cry out against it” was pretty standard prophetic language, straight out of paragraph 3, clause 2b of the “Prophet’s Legal Handbook, Third Edition,” and Jonah could see his life stretching out in front of him, world without end, forced to go places he hated and say bad things to people who hated him, things that could just as easily get him killed, and if not, well he’d heard all about the live coals and scroll sandwiches, thank you very much.  So even though he’d heard the Psalms recited in the Temple, and knew that even the darkness is not dark to God, he left in the dead of the night, taking passage on a ship sailing on the midnight tide for Tarshish—far, far away, and the exact opposite direction from Ninevah.  Sandals, don’t fail me now.

But no sooner had the ship set sail than lo!  A huge storm crashed down upon them, and lo! The waves towered over them, and lo again! The wind howled round about them, and everyone was really scared.  And naturally, the sailors, being an international bunch, had a variety of gods—and even a goddess or two—and they tried them all out, one by one, praying fervently to each in turn.  It was like an ancient beauty pageant, or maybe a game show called “Name That God,” where the only fabulous prize was not getting drowned.

And so they prayed to the Ba’als and they prayed to Asterah.  They prayed to Tiamat and they prayed to her husband Apsu, and various Sun gods and Moon goddesses, but to no avail: the storm raged on, with even more force.  In their desperation, they lightened the load, throwing everything overboard they could get their hands on: the cages of squawking chickens, bound for the finest tables of Tarshish; the beautiful jewels, bound for the most fabulous socialites in Tarshish, but it was not enough: they continued to wallow in the seas, taking on water at an increasingly alarming rate.

The crew was just about to give up, and let the boat go rudderless against the wind, when the captain remembered their  passenger and found him in the hold, fast asleep. Realizing that he represented at least one god they hadn’t yet tried, he said to Jonah:  “What’re you doing fast asleep when we're dying around here?  Get up off your rear and call on your God, and maybe that God will spare us a few thoughts.”

Meanwhile, on the deck above, the men were looking for someone to blame, so they cast lots, and sure enough, they pointed straight at Jonah, and the jig was up: “Who are you, and where do you come from,”  they asked, and who is your god?”  “I am a Hebrew, and I worship the Lord God, maker of heaven and earth, and, yes, even this very ocean!”

And now the sailors were even more afraid, because they’d heard of this God, and they’d also heard that he was one tough customer, and they just knew that Jonah was running away from God—maybe because Jonah, in a senior moment, had let it slip—and so they conferred one with another, asking what they should do with him.  And that’s when Jonah did the most selfless thing he’d ever done:  he told him to throw him overboard.  And the sailors were aghast, because though they were rough-hewn, they were not cruel, so they tried mightily to make it to shore but again, to no avail: they were still on destruction’s edge.

So regretfully, they gave up, and with much apology and wishes of good luck, chucked Jonah over the side.  And lo!  The wind immediately ceased, and the sea became as a millpond, and though their sails were in tatters, and their mast broken off, they were easily able to row to the nearest land.  And for the rest of their days as sailors, they always asked their passengers two simple questions: where are you from and who is your god?  And they never did make it to Tarshish.

Meanwhile, Jonah was in a bit of a fix.  The waters closed over him and he began to drown.  His eyes began to close, his lungs began to burn, and the last thought he had before all went dark was: “At least I don’t have to go to Ninevah!”

But of course, the Lord God has a sense of humor, and the next thing Jonah knew of was a terrible stench, and a darkness like the end of the world, and for just an instant he thought he’d gone to join his ancestor Abraham, who apparently hadn’t had a bath in ages.  But, no, on second thought, it wasn’t sheep he smelled, or unwashed Israelite, but fish.  And he rolled over on his back, and found he was covered in funky, gooey slime, and he knew he wasn’t in Palestine anymore.

And gradually, as his eyes adjusted, he became aware of a ghostly phosphorescence, a greenish, putrescent glow, and he saw coins, jewelry and a wooden cask, scattered around the strangely spongy floor.   Most worrisome, though, was the perfectly preserved carcass of an entire cow.  How she got there, he couldn’t even begin to fathom, because by now he’d figured out where he was: in the belly of a great fish.

Well.  Out of his mouth came the most profane, un-prophetic words you’ve ever heard, words I cannot even begin to repeat under the present circumstances, but then he began to think at least I’m not dead.  And then he started praying to the Lord, asking for salvation. How he had the chutzpah to ask God to save him after he’d turn tail and run, I have no idea, but that’s what he did.

And I won’t repeat the prayer, ‘cause it was all whiny and sycophantic, and presumed on his past relationship with God, such as it was, but lo! The Lord—the long-suffering God of idiots and second chances—heard his prayer, and spoke to the fish, which immediately vomited Jonah up all over the dry land.

The Lord said “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.”  And Jonah couldn’t help but notice that God used almost the exact same words as the first time, and he got the hint that God had better not have to ask a third time, so he picked his slimy self up and headed for Ninevah.

Now Ninevah was a huge city, the biggest city anybody had ever seen, so big that even on the fastest camel alive, it would take you ten days to get across it.  So big that even the fastest carrier pigeon would take five days to get to the other side.  So big that even a jaguar—the car, not the animal—would take three whole days to get across.

But Jonah had no intention of getting across, he wanted to do the bare minimum to get God off his back so he wouldn’t be fish bait again.  So he crept in through the South Gate (called “the Turtle Gate,” though nobody had ever seen a turtle before) and a pitiful sight he made.  The fish slime had dried to a golden, flaky crust, and it made him itch all over.  His clothes stuck to his body.  And he was followed wherever he went by a pack of hungry dogs, hoping for a tasty bite of carp. But he crept a little way into the city and whispered: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” and he left of the city the way he entered, muttering “there!  That oughta hold him” under his breath.

But then a strange and wonderful thing happened: his message began to spread throughout the city.  Kitchen servants told household servants.  Household servants told the heads of their households.  “Forty days more and Ninevah shall be overthrown.”  The heads of households told their friends in the markets, who told the harness-makers and the vegetable sellers and fish-wives.  “Forty days more and Ninevah shall be overthrown.”  If you had been in a balloon above the city, you would have seen the disturbance spread like ripples across a country pond. “Forty days more and Ninevah shall be overthrown.”

And the people of Ninevah repented, they changed their ways, and sackcloth and ashes became the new black at all the best parties, and when the King heard it—“Forty days more and Ninevah shall be overthrown”—he repented, and ordered all his servants and flunkies and yes-men to wear sackcloth and ashes for a whole year.

And the Lord looked down upon it all and was very pleased, so pleased that God changed God’s mind and decided not to overthrow the city.  And there was rejoicing in the markets, hugging and kissing in the streets, and a holiday was proclaimed.  And as for Jonah?   Well, you’d think he’d be happy that all those people had been saved, and you’d think he’d have at least a little pride in what he’d done, how obeying the word of the Lord had, in the end, worked out.  But if you thought any of these things you’d be wrong, because Jonah was mad.  So mad that he went out a little ways from the city, sat down, and began to sulk.

And he said to the Lord: “Isn’t this just why I ran away in the first place?  Didn’t I know that you are a gracious God, slow to anger, and always willing to forgive?  And now look what you’ve done, you’ve gone and made a liar out of me, nobody will believe a word I say, my prophetic credibility has just been ruined.”  And he raised his hands in supplication and fell to his knees and said to the Lord  “Take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

In response, God told a bush to grow over Jonah’s head to make him shade and keep the hot sun off of him.  And Jonah was mollified and very happy about the bush, and ceased his whining and carrying on.  But the next night, God, the told a worm to eat all of the leaves off the bush, so that the next day, Jonah was sweltering in the heat once again.  And Jonah said to the Lord: “take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

And at this, the Lord spoke to him one more time: “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor nor did you   grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

And that is the word of the Lord.  Amen.

                                                                   

Samuel Stormcrow [1 Samuel 3:1 - 10 (11 - 20)]

     I’m sure we’ve all seen ads for movies or books or TV shows that “quote” reviewers . . .  “A Wonder!” (A.O. Scott, New York Times), or “Brilliant” (David Ansen, Newsweek) or maybe “A Masterpiece!” (John Jacobs, L.A. Times).  But if you read the whole reviews, you’ll see that sometimes, they really said “It’s a wonder this lousy script ever got filmed” or “I’m sure they wanted to make a brilliant film, but didn’t come anywhere close” or “’War and Peace’ is a masterpiece, but this thing is really bad.”  The words have been taken out of context, haven’t they?  The entire quote hasn’t been . . . quoted, because to do so would change the message the quoter wants to convey. 

     Whenever you run across some parentheses like in today’s reading, which mean the verses are optional, you should I think the same thing: hmmm . . . like the movie quotes, are there verses in this passage that don’t fit the message the lectionary is trying to get across?  I know as a preacher, it makes me suspicious, and causes me to dig deeper to find out just what it is that the lectionary committee doesn’t want read to the congregation.

     It might be just length—apparently, they the folks who put the Lectionary together don’t think Christians have too long an attention span.  Or, it might be that the verses don’t fit the theological theme for the day, or what’s worse, don’t fit the collective theological biases of the Lectionary committee.  And I think it’s kind of a combination of the last two in this case.  The lectionary wants this Sunday to be about God’s call—thus the cute story of Samuel, sleeping in the temple.  But verses 11 through 20, which clearly belong with the first ten, take us away from calling into—gasp!—judgment.  And the lectionary committee thinks think that congregants don’t want to hear about judgment, and they’re probably right about that—it tends to make them uncomfortable.  I know it does me . . .

     Without the second half of our passage, this is just a nice little call story, with a pretty simple upshot: Answer the call!  Samuel answers the call, and look where it gets him: he becomes the last of the judges (or maybe the first of a new kind of prophet), and he’s able to assist Israel in the transition to a full-time King.  Be like Samuel, goes the story, answer the call, ‘cause you never know what the Lord has in store for you.

     But the second half, the judgment half, contains rich lessons for our life together as a congregation, and how we figure out God’s preferred for our congregation . . . so let’s look at both, shall we?  We open on an ominous note: the word of the Lord was rare in those days, and given the general Biblical observation that the Word of God is the prime creative mover in our world,., that’s saying a mouthful, isn’t it?  The word of the Lord—the motive force of creation, that spoke the planet into being, and that gives guidance and comfort to God’s people—hadn’t been around much.  Further, visions—whether waking or, like most, during sleep—were not widespread.  It was like a drought of the Lord, a dry spell from God’s guiding presence.

     And it’s a biting commentary when the word of the Lord is rare in the Temple, just where it should be the most abundant . . . we’ve all been in churches where that seems to be the case.  Maybe even in our own church, that’s sometimes true . . . and in this case, it might be due to what‘s going on in the house of Eli, was the hereditary head of the priests.  He’d been ignoring the shenanigans of his sons who were, not insignificantly, his heirs.  As priests themselves, they’d been misusing their positions, taking the best of the sacrifices, before the fat had been burnt off, and if that wasn’t bad enough, they’d been having sex with the serving girls at the temple.  As the narrator put it, they were scoundrels, with no regard for the Lord.

     And as our story opens, Eli—whose name, ironically enough, means “my God”—is laying down in his room, and his eyesight has grown dim and he can’t see, and there’s more than physical blindness afoot here, because he refuses to see his sons transgressions, or at least do anything about them.  And then there were all those visions, which he didn’t see, but as head priest certainly should have . . . And Samuel is laying down in the temple itself, for the lamp of the Lord hasn’t yet gone out . . . and there’s symbolic weight here as well . . . even though it might seem so, even though nobody is seeing visions, the light of the Lord has not quite gone out, and to prove it, God speaks to Samuel . . 

     And God says; “Samuel! . . . Samuel!”  But Samuel, whose name means—again ironically—“hears God,” doesn’t hear God, despite his ministering in the Temple, and it may be because he who is named “hears God” doesn’t yet know God, maybe he thinks Eli is his God—after all, he’s got the name for it.  Whatever the reason:  he goes running into Eli’s bedroom, waking the old fellow up, and saying “Here I am, for you called me.”  And here’s the thing: despite being the head priest and all, and having that name to boot, Eli doesn’t get it that it’s God who’s doing the calling, and tells him to go back to bed.  Have I mentioned that irony is a staple in Jewish humor?

     Well, again the Lord calls him—“Samuel!  . . . Samuel . . . Hears God, hears God!” and again Samuel goes running to Eli, saying “Here I am,” and once again the old priest—whose job it is to know when God is talking—doesn’t, and sends him back saying “I didn’t call, my son.”  Finally, a third time—get the perfect number three?—a third time God calls out “Samuel!  . . . Samuel!,” but this time, when Hears God runs to My God saying “Here I am,” all of the old priest finally perceives who it is doing the calling, and tells the boy to lie back down, and if God calls, this time answer, for Pete’s sake.

     And on the fourth call, notice it’s once beyond perfect, he answers God’s call . . . and is rewarded with an earful.  “I’m gonna tell you something that’ll make you ears tingle,” says the Lord, and suddenly, the humor drains right out of our story, it gets real serious all of a sudden, because God’s not talking some gossip-girl, Bobby-told-Brenda-who-told-me” smack, here, but that God is going to bring down the house of Eli because of all the bad stuff that’s been going on.  And this is serious business, because Eli is the hereditary high priest, and a judge to boot, one of those hired guns that the Hebrews would bring in from time to time to take care of leadership matters, and here God was, fixing to get rid of that powerful man.

     And not only was God going to remove Eli, stripping him of power, but he was going to replace him with Samuel, which may explain why he was, ah  . . . reluctant to tell Eli about it.  Eli, who held supreme power over the Hebrew people, could have just as easily said “Aha!  How interesting . . . listen, my boy, will you check that the door to the temple is closed, and that there are no other priests about . . . and fetch me that ceremonial knife while you’re at it, would you?”

     Truth be told, Samuel had some affection for the old man, who was the only father he’d ever known, so it saddens him to be the storm crow, the bearer of bad news, but Samuel says no:  go ahead and tell me.  He tells him to go ahead, that he wants to hear what the Lord has said.  Though he was experienced enough to know that the Word of God inevitably brings change, and with it often turmoil, he also knows that it is his job as a priest and child of God to hear, to discern what God has planned, whether it means pain for him personally or not.

     As I mentioned earlier, we can read this—especially the first ten verses—as a simple little call story, one faithful response, rewarded by an appointment as the highest official in the land, but there’s more to be had here . . . we can all feel like the word of God is rare, that vision—that vision thing—is scarce, but is it really as rare as all that?  Or is it that we in churches don’t hear it, don’t recognize it when it happens?  Look at Samuel . . . he hears, with his ears, but doesn’t understand that it’s God . . . and his mentor, Eli, the one with all the experience . . . God has to speak three times  before he figures out that it’s the word of the Lord.

     Maybe, in our churches today, the word of God isn’t as rare as we might think . . . maybe, as in the case of Eli and Samuel, we just don’t notice it when it comes.   Benedictine monks know this, and they deliberately practice seeking God in all things . . . they look for God in the people they meet, listen for God’s word in whatever they say, watch for God’s word in whatever they do, and whatever happens to them throughout the day.  And at night, before they sleep, they recite the Song of Simeon—mine eyes have seen your salvation—and they go back over the day, looking for where they have seen the Word of God, looking for where they have seen Christ.

     But the word of God comes not just to individuals, or perhaps not even primarily to individuals, it comes to communities of faith, like churches and synagogues, and like the one surrounding the temple in our passage.  And it often takes a community to interpret, to discern that word as well . . . it certainly did in Samuel’s case, didn’t it?  If it weren’t for Eli, the more experienced member of the priestly caste surrounding the temple, the word of God would have gone unheeded, unnoticed, even.  And that’s how it is in any faith community, or the way it’s supposed to be, at any rate.  The wiser heads, those with more experience in those matters, perhaps with more biblical knowledge, provide guidance and wisdom to hear and decipher what God is saying.

     Finally, it takes courage to hear God’s word, because it often upsets the apple cart.  Eli had gotten complacent, he’d gotten used to things as they are . . . he knew what his sons were doing, yet he did nothing . . . and he surely knew what God was going to say, or at least the gist of it, because he’d been warned before.  Yet he heard it anyway.  When Samuel came looking for him to speak to him that word, he said—like Samuel had said to him before—“Here I am.”  Here I am, Samuel, here I am, Lord, I will hear what you have to say.

     Sisters and Brothers, listening for and hearing God’s word is hard, complicated business.   It’s also scary business because we know, like Eli, that God’s word—as it did when it first blew across the waters at creation—God’s word brings change.  Much easier, I think, to sit back on our laurels, do what we know how to do, what we know works and makes us comfortable.  God’s word brings anxiety.  Commotion.  Turmoil.

     But . . . it also brings . . . hope.  After Samuel became the high priest and judge, the nation of Israel was transformed, God gave them a king, a monarchy, a perpetual house of David.  And for churches the Word brings the same thing: new programs, new people, new life.  Hearing and heeding the word of the Lord leads to transformation and a growing, vibrant, healthy ministry as we rest in God’s will and let God lead us into his preferred future.  Amen.