Jonah 3:10-4:11
Charles J. Tomlin, July 4th, 2021
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Series: The Roots of God’s Justice 13/20
Happy Fourth everyone!
On this Independence Day we certainly need to find a way to celebrate not only our freedom but also our hope as a country. With all that our country and our world have been going through since the Coronavirus came upon us, we need something that will renew our national spirit. We need to find new strength to move toward the future too, as much still weighs heavy on our ‘national mind’.
One of the most pressing topics, which came to the forefront quite unexpectedly last year, even during the Coronavirus outbreak, was a national discussion about racism. As a result of the unnecessary death of George Floyd in May of last year, a major outcry for racial justice filled the streets of this nation, continually crying out the mantra, ‘Black Lives Matter’. This movement quickly spread across our nation, even during the time most people were on virus lockdown.
Now, on this our national birthday, where are we? How far have we come? I’m a pastor, not a politician, so I don’t plan to get into the political aspects of racism in America or the world, but I do want consider what our Bible requires of God’s people when it comes to justice and fairness. We simply can’t avoid the social and religious truth that we find here in the book of Jonah. This basic truth is that our God isn’t only merciful toward us, but God requires that we show mercy to the those around us too. But what does showing mercy look like? That’s what the small book of Jonah is about. It’s not simple a fish story, but there is something quite fishy about this Jewish preacher who would rather die than show mercy to certain group of people.
HE BECAME ANGRY (1)
What should especially grab our attention in this ancient story is that the very grace we sing about—- praying, singing, America, America! God shed his grace on thee—upon our nation; here, in this story, God freely sheds his grace upon Nineveh, even though Nineveh was well-known to be a corrupt, sinful, and oppressive people in Jonah’s day.
While you might think that the repentance of a nation’s sin would have made Jonah glad, instead Jonah got very upset and angry. And if you read closely, Jonah wasn’t so much angry at God, but he was angry at what it meant to have a God whose love keeps getting bigger and bigger and wider and wider throughout the world. Jonah was angry because he already knew that it’s God’s nature to be ‘gracious and ‘merciful’ to strangers, foreigners, and to former enemies too, not only to God’s people, Israel. Jonah is upset and angry and look at this, Jonah would rather ‘die than live’ because he’s not prepared to go where God’s mercy was taking him in this historical moment. Jonah doesn’t like having to open his heart to people other than those who are most like him.
Sometimes it’s hard for us too, especially when we are asked to show mercy to those who have been our enemies and have threatened to bring us harm. Years ago, I performed a funeral for a man who was an marine fighting against the Japanese during the Second World War. After the war, he went into the car business and formed a relationship with a newly formed Japanese Car Company, Toyota. At that time, nobody else in Greensboro wanted to work with the Japs, but Ex-Marine Garson Rice did. Many tried to warn him against it. He dared to go against the grain of resentment and bitterness, resisting the mantra of American exceptionalism of the 1950’s and the slogan ‘Buy only American’. With his daring spirit Rice built the largest Japanese car dealership in the Southeast. He sold so many cars that other dealerships were taking him to court, but Rice won the court battle and kept ordering more and more cars from Japan. He sold so many, that he even got to know Mr. Toyota personally.
Opening your heart to a former enemy, especially when they are of another culture isn’t easy, even when it’s a money-making business deal. When you treat an enemy, as anything less than an enemy, you are going against your natural, normal feelings for self-preservation. You go against all that has happened, or the hurt you feel and memories you have that raise all kinds of red flags in your psyche. How do you get past feelings from the bombing of Pearl Harbor or forget what the Nazi’s did to so many millions of Jewish lives in the horrors of the Holocaust? Wouldn’t that be especially difficult for those fought, who suffered, and who lost buddies in those wars?
When my Father came to visit me in Germany, after having fought there in the war, I was amazed at how friendly he was toward the Germans. Of course, 50 years had past. He was being polite as a visitor too. But probably more than anything else, I noticed how he deliberately made a decision to put the whole ordeal out of his mind. He told me when we’d enter a certain town or village, ‘’I just don’t recognize anything.” He said that over and over to me. I finally came to realize that this was how he came to deal with it all. He just put it out of his mind. He deliberately did not hold on to the pain and hurt. He thought it was most important to forgive and move on, showing mercy to whom mercy was due. He lived in in the present, and did not get stuck in the past.
But still, it’s certainly not easy for someone who has been in war, to accept an enemy as a business partner, or to accept them as a human being, period. Even in observing Garson Rice’s courage, or my Fathers’ determination, I’m not belittling the real choice the soul must make. Once, I was playing baseball with some youth in an abandoned European soccer park. A few North Vietnamese fellows came and starting playing soccer on corner of the same field with us. I must admit, I was very uncomfortable with having them there. I didn’t even have to go to Vietnam. I had only heard the terrible stories from Veterans or watch the re-enactments in he movies; but it still got me all worked up inside when I actually had to share space with those North Vietnamese. When I looked at them I only saw ‘red andI only saw Vietcong.
The anger, hurt and bitter feelings that were going on in Jonah’s heart and soul were real. When God decided not to bring the calamity upon Nineveh because of their repentance, the text says ‘this was very displeasing to Jonah’ (4:1). For a long time, the Ninevites had been the enemy, and to Jonah they still were. Maybe God ‘changed his mind’, but Jonah hasn’t (3:10) He just couldn’t let it go. To him, Assyria, of which Nineveh was the capital city, was still the large aggressive nation of conquerors in the north, whether they repented or not. Jonah had always been taught to hate and resent them. God might command and even force him through a great fish of Providence to go and preach there, but God couldn’t and didn’t change how he felt in his heart. So Jonah says he would rather ‘die’ than have to live with how things have turned out.
YOU ARE A GRACIOUS GOD
Today, as we celebrate our national values and our individual freedoms, perhaps even reflecting upon how God has blessed us as a nation, the book of Jonah asks us to also think about what’s going with the ‘soul’ of this nation. How do we feel about, not just our former enemies, but how do we think about the ‘other’ person—-people who happen to be with us in this nation, but are not like us. In our changing and increasingly diverse country we don’t even have to go outside our own borders to be forced, like Jonah was, to have to think about the other—-the other kind of people, the other kinds of cultures, or the other kinds of people who make up this nation—-the world that has not only come to us, but has become us.
As we know, besides the U.S. Constitution, one of the greatest American statements ever written, comes from a poem written by Emma Lazarus, a Jewish American, who in 1883, wrote a poem now posted at the pedestal of the Statute of Liberty.
She writes: ‘Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; …
“Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
I especially love that line, ‘From her beacon-hand. Glow world
wide welcome. Did you catch that powerful, amazing image? Lady liberty faces outward. She isn’t only standing in this great position of privilege for
herself alone, but she stands there to inspire those who are still hungry for freedom around the world and she extends her outstretched in welcome to
the world, inviting more, who are in political need, or physical distress to come to this great land of opportunity and hope.
These are beautiful words, and do we not feel a bit of national pride and thanksgiving to live in a ‘goodly land’ that has offered itself as an inspiring and sheltering political beacon of hope and light to the world? Still, this positive, redemptive historical posture isn’t fully reflective of the many current concerns of about illegal immigration and rapid
globalization taking place in our times. How long can lady liberty open her arms without becoming over-burdened and overstretched, even to the point
that she becomes unable to take care of herself, and continue to offer her great gifts to the world.
The topic of immigration, along with racial prejudice and profiling, and discrimination continue to part of the dark side of our American story of freedom and justice for all. It stays with us, and haunts even what is good about us because this isn’t simply the American dark-side, but it reflects the human dark side that goes all the way back to the foundations of human society being addressed here in this ancient Jewish story about Jonah.
Jonah did not want to have to think about the ‘other’. He only wanted to think that God’s blessings were only about him, for him, and for his own people and culture. When God called him to go and preach in Nineveh, he got on a boat and went in the other direction, toward Tarshish. He did not want to go THERE. He did not want to have to CARE, so after his mission was more successful than he wanted, Jonah made his negative feelings obviously clear: ‘This is what I said in my own country’, he says. ‘This is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning, (4:2). Now, Jonah finally comes out with the heart of his problem. He tells God ‘he knew that (God is) gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.’
What we see in this passag is at the heart of what the book of Jonah reveals, both to the Israel then and to us, now. Jonah is finally out with his problem which is also the human problem, not with God per say, but with this ‘kind of God’; the God who is the true God who God must turn out to be, or God can’t be God at all. This true God is the God who is love, who loves us and the other person too. God even loves our enemy as God loves us. Jonah resents this God whose ‘ love is reaching’, as the old youth song of the 1970’s claimed, right down to the ‘place’ we are; right where we live in this America, our America, on July 4th, 2021.
Many years ago, before Teresa and I left for Germany, I was pastor of a nice, family oriented congregation near Shelby. One day I was visiting in a home of a lady with a strong German accent, speaking in broken English, how she had left Germany not many years after the war when she met and married an American G.I. When I asked her about her home in Germany, she quickly told me, quite negatively and regrettably too, that Germany wasn’t Germany anymore. Too many people who weren’t German, she complained, had moved into her old neighborhood. Things had changed too much and it hurt her too much to think about her former home. As she continued ranting and raving, I couldn’t help thinking to myself, ‘Well, North Carolina isn’t North Carolina anymore either, at least as I had known it. In my neighborhood where I grew up I could remember having to listen to anyone who spoke in broken English, and she doesn’t realize Im accepting her. Of course,I thought this, but didn’t say it.
This extreme resistance to expanding love and necessary change is exactly what was happening in the Jewish culture of Jonah’s day. The book of Jonah was written to a people, yes even God’s people, who were struggling to learn how their God, who is the true God, doesn’t belong only to them. We are observing how their own understanding of the world is growing bigger, becoming more complicated and more diverse than they had realized before. The book of Jonah is part of a Bible that addresses this growing pain that was taking place in the religious and national soul. Jonah’s story reflects how God’s people were being forced, just like Jonah was, to come to grips with their own anger too, that the true God, their God, is big enough to love the whole world.
When I grew up in Southern Baptist life, I was part of a church that supported World Missions through a great effort known as the Cooperative Program. I grew up thinking Southern Baptist were the greatest missionary force at work in the world. But of course, when I became a missionary myself, I grew in my own understanding of the world and missions too. I came to realize that there were other great sending agencies out there too. Yes, God was doing great work through Southern Baptist, but we weren’t and still aren’t the only ones. But it’s so easy to think the world you know is the only world that is. It’s so easy to think that only life as you know it, is the way things should be or will remain.
I think we all experience these kinds of naïveté or provincialism to a certain extent, until we have experiences and meet people who expand our horizons. Even wonderful people in the churches, who have graciously and wonderfully supported missions in and around the world, haven’t always known what it would actually be like get to know someone or appreciate someone who is from another culture. When we lived in Greensboro, Teresa and I participated in a International student ministry that got to know actual students from other cultures who came to the U.S. to study. They were some of the smartest people from their respective cultures, but they shared with us how difficult it was to adjust to life in the US, where it was obvious that people, even some church people, thought less of them because they looked different, dressed different, ate different foods, or because their English speaking skills were not that of a native speaker. They came to America with high ideals of how nice and kind Americans were, but shared with us, some their bad experiences. That’s why this ministry had started; and at that time, we were inviting church other church folks to join us or support us in that ministry, to help them adjust and to help us get to know good people who were m be different, but were very much more like us that different. These students were people loved by God just as much as we were, and that’s what that ministry was about. We even annually meet for a Thanksgiving Dinner, the local churches sponsored at First Baptist Church, so those international students could learn that people in the churches cared just God loved.
This is what we believe, that God loves us all the same, but unfortunately, it isn’t always a belief that’s so easily lived and acted upon in the real, changing world around us. It’s so much easier to remain angry like Jonah does than to go forward with Jesus, to this loving place that many didn’t want to go.
And isn’t just an American problem, a Jewish problem, nor is it only a Christian problem, but it’s a human problem. It’s human ( and fallen too) to believe that only how we think, how we see things, and how we believe, is the only way all the world should work. This self-focused attitude, which can flow not so much out of our flaws, but also flows out of our own successes, our own goodness, or like in Israel out of our own sense of ‘choosiness’, can create or attribute to the very crisis Jonah experiences in this book. This story was written, because it was shocking to some, maybe even to most of God’s people exactly because they indeed were God’s people. It is shocking that the God of Israel, their God, who is the true God, because he is God, is God not only of Israel, but of the whole world. This God loves, and can only love, because he is love, will forgive, and shows his mercy to anyone, and possibly everyone; not only to us.
IT IS BETTER FOR ME TO DIE
A story like this, when we rightly understand both why it was written and what it was written about, truly has more to say to us on our Independence Day than we might have ever thought. While we are indeed a blessed, goodly, and even a great people, we must not allow the challenges of this day, whether they be illegal immigration, declarations of holy war, or personal fears about the future, to discourage, dissuade nor distract us from the grand and glorious calling given in the gift and ‘goodness’ of our nation. We haven’t been given this great privilege only for ourselves. The soul of this nation has always been soft for those who are struggling under the dark oppressive evils of this world.
I came across a touching story, a Jewish story that turns this story of Jonah on its head; or should I say ‘puts the shoe on the other foot’. I was watching a Gospel Music special and one of the musicians looked Jewish and was also a former member of the gospel group, The Issacs. His mother, who formed the group, had quite a story, and she’d written about it in a autobiography, You Don’t Cry Out Loud.’ In an interview with Baptist Press she told how she, a Jewish girl from New York, came to meet a Bluegrass hillbilly from Kentucky and then move to Tennessee and become a gospel music artist. I don’t have time to tell her story here, but in a nutshell she told how the opportunities of freedom and the Christian witness to faith in Jesus Christ, not only answered her questions and gave her hope, but it also enable her family, to find opportunity and redemption from an evil that almost killed her parents before she was born.
What I think is so incredible about Lily Issac’s story, which is a story of immigration and salvation, should remind us today, that one of the great blessings of this nation is not simply the freedom and hope we have for ourselves, buts it’s the great blessing of freedom and hope we have to give to others. This is the great truth that God was teaching his people through Jonah’s story. It’s a story that reminds us that in the sharing of this great gift of freedom, we always gain much more by sharing than we ever could by keeping it only for ourselves.
In a church where I was pastor, I invited and asked the congregation to sponsored an international choir from Europe to perform in our church and in the community. Many of the church members were at first hesitant and reluctant to participate in sponsoring a foreign guest in their own home, but I continued to pled, beg, and assign homes. We had some 30 choir members staying in almost that many homes. I know that some of our host families were nervous, but with encouragement and some curiosity too, they were willing and gracious to house or entertain our guests.
After the concerts were over, I’ll never forget the great experience our members had with these foreign guests. They made relationships that impacted them greatly, and changed their lives. On the front end, they were reluctant, but after it was over they didn’t want the experience to end. In fact, for months afterward, I heard reports of continual correspondence with their new international friends.
Unfortunately, that’s not the experience of Jonah. As we come to the end this story, Jonah says he would rather die than have to get to know, appreciate or live side-by-side with these people that God loves and has forgiven. Jonah is fine having a God who loves him and his own, but he’s not fine with a God who actually loves the others who are in the world. I guess that song we sing, ‘red, yellow, black, and white, they are all precious in God’s sight,’ just wouldn’t go over well with Jonah in his real life. What about us?
I know that this doesn’t sound like a patriotic message for today. Some might think I should be talking about who America was, or has been. But folks, my message is right here—America isn’t a has been. In a news spot I heard Simone saying that American isn’t appreciated as the world power she once was. So what? America didn’t get to be a world power by being a world power, just like Israel didn’t become the worlds greatest religion by being a the greatest religion. No, these blessings came to both Israel of old and to America of today, because of how God shed his grace to and through us.
I am often amused at those who spend money to have their DNA traced to certain European lands, connecting themselves to some specific historical past, only to find out they are a mixture of most everything and who knows where they are actually from. You don’t answer your calling nor achieve an identity only by looking backward. Shouldn’t we be more focused on the future of our great country, than being stuck in or stuck on our past? God desires not only to shed his grace upon us, but he sheds his grace on us so that grace can spill over onto others too.
So, now, back to America’s problem, which can still be America’s opportunity. What are we to do, when the population becomes more diverse and complex? This ‘enlarging’ blessing and also the outgoing nature of God’s grace, made Jonah very angry. What about us, in our time in history?
One more story. Not long ago, before the Virus hit, I visited a German Restaurant. I wonder whether that business will even survive this crisis. Interestingly, the family left Germany to come to the US, because they explained to us how their hometown, one of the most beautiful areas of Southern Germany, was being overrun by Arabs and foreigners. They didn’t want their children to be raised in such a changing environment. So, how did they respond? They sold their home, restaurant, and family hotel business so they could move their family to America and be around a more purely, white, European-like people.
Folks, this whole question about immigration is a challenging, complicated issue. I’m not trying to over simplify it. What I’m am trying to remind us, as we think about God’s loving mercy, is this question that we must continually ask ourselves in an increasingly globalized, and shrinking world. Who are we, really? What does it mean to be American? Is the grace and goodness we call America only a gift for us alone, or are we a gift for the world? And is this gift of grace only to bless the world as long as they stay where they are, or does this blessing extend to others too, especially to those who legally come to our own shores?
Yes, these are complicated questions, I know, but isn’t it a wonderful blessing that we are in a land where the world still wants to come to our land for opportunity and hope? God still sheds his grace on us, and this country is a gift, so shouldn’t we want to share that grace with those who still need what have been m so privileged to know?
When I think about the attitude we should because of who we are and have been given, it makes what Jonah feels and does look so silly. There he is, a man angry because of love when it is this kind of love that gives him the only hope could ever have. It’s the same for us. We may have strong feelings about how what freedom means, but freedom loses all meaning when it doesn’t extend to those who need that freedom the most today. Long live this gift of merciful and loving hope, that God can still give to the world through us. Don’t be angry, barking at the moon like Jonah, but find a way to find joy and purpose by extending God’s free grace to someone beyond yourself. Amen.
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