Sermon:
January 25, 1998

Scripture:
Jonah 1:1-3
Jonah 3:10-4:11

I am going to make a guess about you this morning. In your mind, if I mention the name Jonah, I'll guess you associate it with only one thing. Am I right? That one thing is the act of being swallowed by a whale. That is what happens in the minds of most people, and I believe it is a tragedy of real proportions. The little book that bears Jonah's name is actually one of the most important documents in the whole Old Testament. It describes with great skill and insight the interaction between a global God and a narrow, prejudiced human being. In a sense, it is a microcosm of the whole biblical drama. For one of the things God is trying to accomplish in history is to grow us human beings up to our full potential. After all, we are created in the image of a God who has made all things and loves everything he has made. Thus, getting us to the place where our range of affection is as wide as his is one of the foremost goals of history. Yet this is by no means an easy task, as the book of Jonah so graphically illustrates. Here is the story, a parable actually, of God's attempt to enlarge the compassion of one human being. Such a study has always been important, but it is especially important now, given our present age and mindset, and given what we as a church are being called to do and be as we go to Tonjibe.

There's an avant-garde phrase out there, almost a cliché, that our world is now a global village. You know that, I know that. There was a time when human beings clustered in clan-like groupings and lived in virtual isolation from each other. They had their own life styles and there was very little interaction between them. But today that is no longer true. That kind of isolation is no longer possible. The network of instant communication and travel has all but eliminated the reality of distance. Now, whether we like it or not, radically different kinds of human beings find themselves face to face and side by side with one another. And such proximity can produce explosive strain if the ability to tolerate diversity or live creatively and harmoniously with utterly different kinds of people is not developed. Never in the history of this planet has there been a greater need for persons of broad compassion than right now, which is why we're in the book of Jonah this morning. What God was attempting to do with this one man back then is what he has been trying to do with all of us across the ages, and the need for this sort of thing has now become essential. Yet the task of widening and deepening a human heart is by no means an easy one. It is why 17 persons from this church are going to Tonjibe tomorrow, to try to widen and deepen not only our hearts, but yours as well. How can it happen? Let's observe how one writer of great skill depicts the process.

The story begins like any other book of the Old Testament. The Word of the Lord came to Jonah and called on him to go to Ninevah and "to cry out against those people because of their great wickedness and call them to repentance." Such an action is entirely consistent with the nature of Hebrew faith from its very beginning. When Yahweh called Abraham, one of his promises was that his descendants would provide a way "for all families of the earth to bless themselves." There was a universalism implicit in the very earliest forms of biblical religion. This particular God was never conceived as a tribal Deity concerned only for a tiny segment of humanity. From the beginning he was a global God. Thus, it is not surprising that he would instruct one of "the people blessing" to exercise ministry on behalf of another part of the human family. However, at this point, the story takes an utterly unexpected turn. Instead of setting out for Ninevah, which was the capital of the Assyrian empire and located to the northeast of Israel, Jonah goes down to Joppa, the nearest seaport, and boards a ship that is headed to Tarshish, a Phoenician city in the province of Spain. If you know anything about the geography of that part of the world, you have figured out that this means that when God called him to go east, Jonah responded by going west, exactly the opposite direction of the Divine instruction. Now why, do you suppose, would a prophet of God do such a thing?

The writer makes it clear that Jonah's problem was the same one that Dr. Suess made famous in his modern day classic, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. If you have read that story to your children as many times as I have read it to mine, not to mention the many times you have seen the Christmas special on TV, you will remember that the Grinch's problem was that "his heart was two sizes too small," and that is what made him act so horribly. The prophet, Jonah, suffered from that same affliction. Like most of the Israelites of his day, he had developed a special antipathy for the Assyrians. They were a brutal and aggressive people who had lived on the northeast border of Palestine for many centuries. Again and again they harassed the children of Israel, and in the 8^th century B.C. they had mounted an all-out war, overrun the Northern Kingdom and carried away into exile many of the Hebrews. As a result, the Assyrians had come to epitomize everything the Israelites despised. They were regarded as little better than animals, the "lowest of the low," beyond any hope of redemption, and certainly possessing no capacity for God. In fact, the Israelites had gradually come to feel this way about most non-Jewish people. They referred to them as "dogs" and saw them fit only for destruction. Unfortunately, the old Abrahamic ideal of providing a way for all the families of the earth to bless themselves had virtually gotten lost by Jonah's time. There was little positive concern for anyone left in Israel by this time, which is why the word that came to Jonah was handled as it was. It cut squarely across all the hostilities and prejudices that he had developed toward non-Jewish people. If Hitler had suddenly been asked in 1935 to go and save the Jews rather than destroy them, it would have been no more outlandish than asking Jonah to go and help the Assyrians. The very idea activated all his prejudices and this is why he lost no time in moving in the opposite direction. It was not because the task was too difficult or because he was afraid that he might fail. In truth, he was afraid he might succeed. His fleeing toward Tarshish was motivated by a deep antipathy for the Assyrians. To have anything to do with them, much less help them, was an utterly repulsive thought to Jonah.

Here is the problem a global God always faces in trying to develop universal human spirits, and it needs to be acknowledged that this was not just Jonah's problem or Israel's problem. It is the problem of all of us whose hearts may be "two sizes too small." You see, when you get right down to it, most of us have our "Ninevahs" and our "Assyrians" somewhere. That is, there is some group of people we have come to abhor. We usually think of them as utterly different from ourselves. We see them as the epitome of all that is evil and distasteful. The mere mention of them causes blood to rush to our brains. We have nothing but negative antipathy for them. Such contempt can assume any number of forms. It can be a class of people, like the very rich or the very poor or the staunchly middle-class. Or it can be a racial grouping like Italians or Mexican-Americans or Negroes or Polish. Or it may not be the color of the person's skin, but the color of that one's ideas that infuriate us. He may be a conservative, or a liberal, or a "pinko" or a "do-gooder" or it could even be a religious group like the Catholics or the Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses or the Jews. What I am suggesting is that most of us have some blind spot or rage, some group we have come to loathe, and this is what God runs into whenever he proposes we interact with that particular grouping.

Harry Overstreet writes about the gentle people of prejudice. That may be who we are. Folks who are normally courteous and genteel and outgoing, but let them come into contact with a certain focal point of hostility and those same gentle people explode into unbelievable hostility. For Jonah, it was the Assyrians, for Hitler it was the Jews, for the KKK if was the Negro. I don't know who it is for you, but I'll bet that Jonah's problem and Grinch's problem is really a problem for most of us. Our hearts are at least "two sizes too small" when it comes to the call of universal concern. How far is it to Tonjibe?

It is very interesting to note that once the challenge was sounded, Jonah fought back with real vigor. The first thing he did was utterly typical. He attempted to get away from those people he abhorred. That solution to the problem of hostility or antipathy is as old as humans themselves. Call it what you might - separatism, segregation, white flight - it all boils down to our efforts to evade those human beings who offend us. In our own nation and in this century, this has been the way we have attempted to solve our racial and urban problems. But as was the case for Jonah, so it has been for us. It has not really worked. Jonah got into the boat and went to sleep, thinking he had solved the Assyrian problem forever, only to run head-on into a storm. That is what always happens when we try to solve our problems by ignoring them or running away from them. If there were an epidemic of diphtheria on your street, moving two blocks away and doing nothing about the basic cause would solve nothing. It only postpones the crises and actually compounds it by giving the problem more time to grow. Ours is a coherent universe in which there is no ultimate escape. The problems that exist in our city or among the races have only been aggravated by the futile hope that there was some place to run and hide. Jonah found that he could not get away from the Assyrian problem by taking a boat in the opposite direction, and in the drama that takes place while the storm is raging about them at sea, the author very skillfully shows how badly mistaken Jonah had been both about the heathens and about his capacity to care for them. Want an example? Remember the sailor who comes to Jonah and wakes him up and begs Jonah to pray to his God for help? Now here is a touch of exquisite irony - a heathen having to awaken a prophet of Israel to urge him to say his prayers! The point that the writer is trying to make is that these non-Jewish people were not merely animals with no capacity for human awareness or for God. They had much more in common with the "chosen people" than the prejudiced Hebrews wanted to admit. In fact, the length to which these heathen sailors went to try to save Jonah's life is a symbol of how much actual goodness does exist in seemingly rough and different people. Even after Jonah had been thrown overboard and the sea had become quiet again, the writer points out that these sailors offered a sacrifice to Yahweh, underlining the fact that they did have a capacity for God when given a chance.

You see, the people we fear are often not as bad as our prejudice leads us to believe, and coupled with this insight is the fact that Jonah was not as total in his hatred as he might have thought. Strangely enough, when faced with the realities of the storm, Jonah acknowledged that he was the one at fault because he was running away from his God and proposed that the sailors throw him overboard so that their lives might be saved. Here again is the touch of irony - Jonah is pictured as feeling real compassion for those non-Jewish persons on a face to face level. Yet when he conceived of those same people in a group, he was filled with hostility. He was unwilling to go to Ninevah and give the word of salvation there, but he was willing to give his life on behalf of a few heathen sailors!

I have seen the same quirk of prejudice again and again in my own lifetime and so have you. I lived in the south for almost 30 years and had many friends who would do anything in the world for the black people who worked with them or whom they knew personally. But mention the race as a whole and those same persons would assume an entirely different stance of hostility. Don't you see? The writer is pointing out here the incredible intricacies of the human heart and how there is more positive potential for love here than we often realize. The despised group was really much better and Jonah himself more capable of concern than appears on the surface of the prejudiced heart. Finally, however, Jonah is thrown overboard, and the famous fish comes and saves him, and after a period of reflection Jonah is shown mercy and given a second opportunity and called once more to fulfill the ancient Hebrew vocation of being a means by which all families of the earth can bless themselves. Could that be what our trip to Tonjibe is all about? That we are called to the same calling as Jonah? Just how far is it to Tonjibe?

Amazingly enough, even after all these experiences at sea, Jonah's hostility remains and simply finds a new form of expression. This time Jonah does go to Ninevah, but nothing in his attitude has really changed. His approach now is to deliver a message of harsh denunciation upon these hated people. He walks through the streets of Ninevah saying with relish, "In 40 days you are going to be destroyed." If at any point in the story Jonah appeared to experience happiness, it is here. The prophet of doom has no tears in his eyes. If he has to associate with these vile Assyrians, then denunciation and destruction is all he can think about.

The story is so typically ours it hardly needs to be said because we are just like Jonah. You see, for a lot of us when we hear God calling us to do things and to be with people that we don't want to be with, well who wants to go off to a place called Tonjibe, an isolated place where they put a group of people that nobody likes. They're forgotten, they're despised, they're the outcasts, the downcasts of their own country. They've taken care of dealing with those people by just putting them off somewhere. Why would we go to Tonjibe? Who can believe that those people are even capable of loving God or of receiving God's love? But you see, when we come back from Tonjibe and we have the stories and can show you the pictures face to face, when we show you a picture of a little girl who can go to school and has a book and a teacher because First United Methodist Church of Birmingham has extended the love of God in that place, you're not going to have any trouble, I promise you, even the hardest of hearts among us who says, "Why are we doing this? Why are we spending all that money sending these people on a vacation?"

Let me tell you about this vacation. We're going to sleep on the cement floor of the Methodist church. We all have bought an air mattress, we've taken sleeping bags, but we're told it's so hot that we're not going to want to get in them. Those of us who decided we'd spring for it, and I think it's most of us, have bought a mosquito net tent to go over our sleeping bags. We aren't sure about the water, we aren't sure about the electricity. We're in the middle of nowhere. This is not a vacation. It's not an easy trip that we're going to make. So understand that the people who are seated here in front of me are making a great personal sacrifice and have paid their own way to go on this trip. You have given much of the money for our building supplies and other things, but every member of this team has paid their own expenses to go on this "vacation" that we are taking.

But don't you see, God somehow believes in us, in the First United Methodist Church of Birmingham, the same way he does in Jonah. He says, "You know, there's more potential for human love there than you all are realizing, and I'm going to show you again. I'm going to give you another chance." And Jonah eventually got spit out of the whale and he got another chance too. And then what did he do again? Well, then he decided, "I'll go do what the Lord told me." And he went to Ninevah, and he walked through the streets being the prophet of doom and gloom. Then he went up on the hillside and he decided to sit there and watch on what the Lord would do. And the Lord looked at the people that he loved, those awful Assyrians, and said, "They're my people too, and I'm going to bless them." And Jonah got so mad. Jonah was furious. He said, "Lord, this isn't fair. I want you to just rain fire down, wipe them out. Get rid of them." And the Lord said, "Jonah, you still don't get it. I love you, and I love them too." And in one more way, before the story ends, the Lord tries to show Jonah to grow his heart out of that "two sizes too small."

We don't really know what happens to Jonah. It's interesting we don't hear what happens to him. It just ends abruptly, the Book of Jonah does. But maybe that's God's plan. Because maybe we're not supposed to spend our time and energy focusing on what Jonah did. Maybe we're supposed to spend our time and energy focusing on what we are doing.

How far is Tonjibe for you? Is it a place where you can realize God might even call us to these native indigenous people of that land, who are so forgotten and despised by that country that they have never even been citizens of their own nation until five years ago? Five years ago they were given status as citizens. So if you don't acknowledge they even exist, that kind of wipes them out doesn't it? Just pretend they aren't there. Build a little village with 35 little houses, none of which are bigger than 490 square feet with several families living in a lot of them. Build those 35 little houses up in the mountains, way away from anywhere, where there are no kinds of services like electricity or water, where there's not tillable land for the people to support themselves. Why would you need to send those people a teacher and have a school? They can't learn anything, and they definitely don't even know who God is. And I firmly believe that God looked on that and said, "No, these are my people too." And that's the way the little village of Tonjibe was until 1995 when some people from another church, just like these who sit in front of you, answered a call and went to Tonjibe and built the little building that's the Methodist Church where we will be sleeping. And though the government said, "We don't need a school there, they don't need education," they built a little one room school. Today there are 72 children in that village and in that one room with one teacher. So we go to Tonjibe to put another room on that school because the government finally had to acknowledge them. They're citizens now. They've never had health services or social services until they were citizens. Now you've go to admit they exist, but you still stick them way out there. But now the government said, "OK, you Americans put another little room on that school, and we'll send another teacher. And so the word of the Lord is, "Go to Tonjibe, people of First United Methodist Church of Birmingham and friends. Go there and carry the word of my love." And some people have heard that call over the last year and have headed to Tarshish instead. But enough of you in this church family have heard it, and enough of you have realized you're uncomfortable with your heart that's "two sizes too small" and God is calling you to reach out of it and to act a little bit differently.

How far is Tonjibe for you? There's a wonderful little book called, The Report to Greco, and in it Nikos Kazantzakis tells of an earnest young man who went to a pretty deserted, remote island where there'd been generations of people who lived kind of like hermits who were searching after God. One day this young man talked to one of the saintly old hermits and he said to him, "Tell me, father, do you still wrestle with the devil after all your years of being out here searching for God?" And the saintly old man said, "Oh no, my son, I've grown too old for that. Now I wrestle with God." And the young man said, "Really, but do you hope to win?" And the man answered, "Oh no, my child, I hope to lose." And I hope with all my heart for you and for me that we wrestle with God and that we lose. Because when we do, we go to places like Tonjibe.