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Jonah – Salvaged Faith

Follow the Star: Repent

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Text: Mark 1:14-20, Jonah 3:1-5,10

Over the last year our routines, our work, our families, our vacations… so many parts of our lives were unexpectedly turned upside down and inside out.
Including our church.
One of my mentors often reminds me that church is often the place that we go to escape the change that happens in the world. It has often been one of the only stable places we can turn.
Churches are notorious for being stubborn and afraid to try new things…
After all, we’ve never done it that way before.

But this year, we had to.
We had to adapt.
We had to change with the circumstances.
We had to embrace a new way of being together and being the church.
We had to repent and believe the good news.

The Greek word we translate into “repent” is metanoia.
It is a reorientation.
Turning around.
Changing our thoughts and our actions.
And in scriptures, we are called to repentance, transformation, when we encounter a new understanding of reality… God’s reality.

Well, we’ve certainly had to do that this year.
In light of the reality of a deadly virus, we reoriented ourselves.
We embraced new practices like online worship and small groups and studies.
But we also noticed some things about our church that honestly, we should have changed a long time ago, but we were too stuck in old ways to do it.
One example of this is how our church, like a lot of churches, can get stuck in cliques and groups.
You notice it at coffee time when people tend to sit down with the same group of people every week.
It’s who we know, who we are comfortable with.
But sometimes that means that a new friend to our church is left out.
Now, if I had come down to Faith Hall between services, and mixed up all of the seating arrangements, ya’ll would have revolted on me.
But when worship moved online, we began to host our Zoom coffee time and our breakout rooms got randomly assigned.
No one gets left out and anyone who wants to stay gets to “sit at a table” with different folks each week.
In the process, we’ve made new friends, learned more about each other, and I think our church is stronger as a result.
That is repentance in action.
A new understanding of who we are and new practices that help us to be more faithful to who God is calling us to be.

As we seek to follow the star and align our lives more closely to God, let’s take a deeper look at how repentance plays a role.
Today, we have two different scriptures that help us to embrace what that means. One is an example of how we turn from actions that have separated us from God. The other is how we might turn towards God’s call in our lives.

Let’s start with Jonah.
One of our more traditional ways of speaking about repentance is naming and confessing our sins.
I have to admit that every time I hear the word “repent” I picture someone standing on a street corner holding up a sign.
And, honestly, that’s kind of what Jonah did!
In the Message translation, God’s instructions come to Jonah: “Preach to them. They’re in a bad way and I can’t ignore it any longer.” (3:1-2)
So Jonah walked for three days through the city telling them the end was near…. “In forty days you will be destroyed.”

Notice, Jonah doesn’t tell them to repent.
But his words help the people of this city see reality in a new way.
They recognize their evil and their sin and they turn from it.
The entire community repents, turns around, reorients themselves to God’s preferred future.
They have no promises of mercy, no hope of restoration.
But confronted with reality, they realize they simply cannot go on a moment longer the way they had been living.
They turn from their ways in a moment of repentance.

Over the last year, there have been a number of moments when we have experienced this kind of clarity and need for repentance.
From the death of a black man on a street in Minneapolis, to raging wildfires perpetuated by climate change, to the brazen display of Christian nationalism in the insurrection a few weeks ago, we have been confronted with images that lead us to cry out… this is not who we want to be.
We may disagree about what concrete actions and policy changes need to happen, but our lives have been collectively reoriented, altered, as we have realized there are systemic and interpersonal realities we must turn from.
I think back to the story of the Ninevites who saw their impending doom.
They recognized just how far their lives and their actions were from what God intended for them and they did something about it.
Whenever we are confronted with reality, a new reality, a different reality, we have the opportunity to hold our lives up to the measure of God’s intentions for us.
If what we discover leads us to change our thoughts or actions, that is repentance.

But there is another piece of this story that is important.
God repents.
When God sees how the people have claimed a new reality, how they have truly turned from evil, the divine mind is changed.
God turns from calamity and destruction to mercy and grace.
God experiences metanoia, too.

In our gospel reading from Mark, we find Jesus himself as the street corner preacher, calling everyone he encounters to repent and believe in the good news.
He is not pointing out their faults or their lack of faith. He is not calling them to turn from something that was bad or evil, but calling them towards a new reality, a Kingdom reality.
His words reach Simon and Andrew, James and John, simple fishermen who drop their nets and leave their jobs and their families.
But as Thomas Long, a preacher and professor at Candler School of Theology claims, “Jesus disrupts [their reality] not to destroy but to renew.” He notes how their roles as brothers and sons become transformed into new relationships in God’s family and how even their work becomes a part of how they serve the Kingdom. “Their past has not been obliterated; it has been transformed by Jesus’ call to follow.”
In the light of Christ, they see themselves in a new light and the potential of who they could be.

I have watched over these last years how the people of Immanuel have heard this call and have turned towards God, using their gifts and strengths to serve the Kingdom.
The ways that you have come to understand that church is not simply a place where you find comfort and the familiar, but where you hear the call to become more of what God believes you can be.
I think about the young woman in our church who felt the tug to make blankets for our homeless neighbors.
Or about our knitters who made prayer squares… which we have also shared with essential workers at our local care centers.
I think about men and women in our church who have built sets for VBS that have helped our children to grow closer to Jesus.
And about those who give their time on Sunday mornings in the AV booth to make sure that we remain connected to God and one another.
Or those who manage our finances, or lead us in music, or make sure the food pantry is filled.
And I think about the countless stories you have shared with me about how you are finding new ways to live out your faith in your work place, in your homes.

Repentance is not simply turning from our past and our failures, but it is also about turning toward who God has created you to become and the Kingdom reality that God is bringing to bear upon this earth.
It is, as our first National Youth Poet Laureate said on Wednesday at the inauguration, the remembrance that we are “not broken, but unfinished.”
That there is more to do, more to experience, more ways to serve, that there is a fullness that awaits us if we simply could repent.
Turn around.
Turn towards God.
Change our hearts and our actions.
To allow ourselves to be transformed.
May it be so.

Them, Too!

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When I was looking at seminaries, two of my top schools were in Chicago right across the street from one another in the Hyde Park neighborhood. My mom and I went to visit and we started to imagine what life would be like if I was there. My brother, Tony, was also attending school in Chicago at the Illinois Institute of Technology – right near the White Sox stadium. I started envisioning hopping on the L and going to visit him and all of the possibilities.

But I remember as my eyes lit up, my mom looked back at me with a tiny bit of fear in her eyes. “Katie Marie” she said. “I don’t want you traveling alone in that part of town.”

It was hard enough to send her son to the big city… but her daughter?

We ALL have some definition of what “that part of town” is like. But it is different for each of us.

For some of us, “that part of town” is the street where all the shops are boarded up and folks loiter on the corner.

For some of us, “that part of town” is full of expensive houses and we might get pulled over because of the color of our skin.

For some of us, “that part of town” is where we read about shootings and crime.

For some of us, “that part of town” is where we were a parent or relative was spit on or discriminated against.

It is the place where people aren’t like me. Where we are afraid of what might happen to us if we went there. It is the place where we just can’t wrap our minds around what life must be like there.

And the truth is, we all live in somebody else’s “that part of town.” Or “that part of the country.” Or “that part of the world.”

Each of you were handed this morning a slip of paper.

I want to invite you to take it out right now and hold it in your hand.

This morning, I want to invite us to think about those places where we refuse to go. The people we aren’t sure we want to talk to. The situations we would rather keep our distance from. Maybe it is because you have been hurt. Maybe it is because you are afraid.

This is just for you… not for anyone else to see or read… and what I’m going to ask is not going to be easy.

I want to invite you to write on that paper a place that you stay away from. I want you to think about someone you have intentionally not tried to build a relationship with and write their name. I want us all to spend a minute or two in silence as we reflect and are honest with ourselves and with God.   What people or places come to your mind…

[ pause ]

That might have been the longest minute some of us have ever spent in worship.  I know that wasn’t an easy exercise and I thank you for giving us that time.

Now, fold up that paper and hold it in your hand.

I want you to know that you are not alone.

We all are afraid at times.

We all hesitate to go to certain places.

We all have baggage and prejudice and facts and excuses and our reasons for staying away.

You are not alone.

In fact, Jonah, is just like each of us.

If he was with us this morning, Ninevah would be written on that sheet of paper.

The city of Ninevah was full of horrible, terrible people.

In the book of Nahum the prophet, chapter 2 and 3, we read about their misdeeds:

“Doom, city of bloodshed – all deceit, full of plunder: prey cannot get away. Cracking whip and rumbling wheel, galloping horse and careening chariot! Charging calvary, flashing sword, and glittering spear; countless slain, masses of corpses, endless dead bodies – they stumble over their dead bodies!”

That’s not a pretty picture!

It’s not surprising that Jonah doesn’t want to go.

How would you feel if God asked you to go to this violent, wretched city and tell them all they were about to be destroyed by God’s wrath?

Jonah bought a ticket and headed as fast as he could in the opposite direction.

Well, if you remember the story of Jonah, that didn’t work out so well. He got kicked off the ship, swallowed by a whale, and spit up on the shoreline.

And finally, reluctantly, with fear and trepidation in his heart, he goes.

He goes to “that part” of the world. To “those people.”

He goes to the city and preaches a one sentence sermon:

“Just forty days more and Nineveh will be overthrown!”

He repeats it over and over again as he walks across the city.

Think about “that place” you have written down.

Could you do that?

Not just go to that place you fear, but actually proclaim their destruction?

I think the core of this one sentence sermon was the message that all was lost.

The people were too far gone.

They were just too terrible and God was ready to wipe the slate clean.

And Jonah thought so, too.

He thought the world would be better off without them in it.

What a terrible thing to say.

And yet, if we thought long and hard about the people and the places we have written on our little scraps of paper, I wonder if that phrase maybe had crossed our mind the past.

Anytime we write off someone as hopeless… or treat a community as if it didn’t exist… or think “wow the government would be a whole lot better off if (insert political party here) weren’t around”… we are doing the same thing.

We have done it throughout history… and we have had it done to us.

Whenever the line has been drawn of us/them, good/bad, right/wrong, folks of all sorts of different faith traditions have felt divine calls to pronounce judgment.

The good news is, it isn’t up to us.

Because even when we have declared something hopeless, God isn’t ready to be done yet.

God could have just sent a plague or rained down fire from above upon Ninevah.

But God didn’t.

God called Jonah.

God warned the people.

God gave them a chance.

And even though Jonah didn’t even offer up the possibility of hope in his one sentence sermon of destruction, the people changed their ways.

They repented.

They turned to God.

The entire kingdom, from the king to the lowest in their midst put on sackcloth and ashes.

As Rev. Bill Cotton pointed out in his reflection this week, some translations say even the cattle repented!

Over this season of Epiphany, we have been exploring the light and the dark. We have been wandering back and forth between the two, and one of the things I hope we are discovering is that the dark isn’t a terrible awful place.

There is possibility in the dark.

There are the seeds of creation and re-creation.

And even a place like Ninevah… Even a place or a person like (hold up your piece of paper)… isn’t lost. It isn’t hopeless.

The question is, are we willing to look for the possibility of change?

Will we open our eyes to see the good in a neighborhood or another person?

Will we lay aside our fears and prejudice and assumptions and go to build relationships?

Will we celebrate when we witness transformations?

Will we ourselves be transformed?

Yes, you, too.

Because God is working on your life also. All those pieces of you that are bent out of shape and bruised and dented. You aren’t hopeless either.

So in the words of Christ, “Now is the time! Here come’s God’s Kingdom! Change your hearts and lives and trust in the good news!”